Chapter 4: Social Perception and Managing Diversity

Perception

A cognitive process that enables us to interpret and understand our surroundings

How many stages of social perception are there?

4

Stages of Social Perception

1. Selective Attention/comprehension

2. Encoding and Simplification

3. Storage and Retention

4. Retrieval and Response

Attention

The process of becoming consciously aware of someone or something

Cognitive Categories

Groups of objects that are considered equivalent

Schema

Represents a person’s mental picture or summary of a particular event or type of stimulus

3 key components that influence perception:

1. Characteristics of the perceiver

2. characteristics of the situation

3. Characteristics of the target

Key perceiver characteristics

• Direction of gaze

• Needs and goals

• experience with the target

• category-based knowledge

• Gender and emotional status

• cognitive load

Characteristics of the Target

• Direction of gaze

• Facial features and body shape

• Nonverbal cues

• Appearance or dress

• physical attractiveness

Characteristics of the Situation

• context of interaction

• culture and race consistency

Implicit Cognition

Represents any thoughts or beliefs that are automatically activated from memory without our conscious awareness

Stereotype

An individual’s set of beliefs about the characteristics or attributes of a group

How many steps are stereotypes formed in?

4

Steps to form stereotypes

1. Categorization

2. Inferences

3. Expectations

4. Maintenance

Categorization

Categorizing people into groups according to criteria (such as gender, age, race, and occupation)

Inferences

We infer that all people within a particular category possess the same traits or characteristics (EX; women are nurturing, older people have more job-related accidents)

Expectations

Expectations of others and interpret their behavior according to our stereotypes

Maintenance

Maintaining stereotypes by

• overestimating the frequency of stereotypic behaviors exhibited by others

• Incorrectly explaining expected and unexpected behaviors

• Differentiating minority individuals from ourselves

Casual Attributions

Suspected or inferred causes of behavior

Internal Factors

Factors within a person (such as ability) that are attributed to behavior

External Factors

Factors within the environment (such as a difficult task) that are attributed to behavior

Consensus

Compares a person’s behavior on one task with his or her behavior on other tasks (among people)

Distinctiveness

Compares a person’s behavior on one task with his or her behavior on other tasks (across tasks)

Consistency

Judges whether the individual’s performance on a given task is consistent over time (over time)

Fundamental Attribution Bias

Reflects our tendency to attribute another person’s behavior to his or her personal characteristics, rather than to situational factors

Self-Serving Bias

Represents our tendency to take more personal responsibility for success than for failure

Demographics

The statistical measurements of populations and their qualities (such as age, race, gender, or income)

Diversity

Represents the multitude of individual differences and similarities that exist among people

Surface-level characteristics

Those that are quickly apparent to interactants, such as race, gender, and age

Deep-level characteristics

Those who take time to immerse themselves in interactions, such as attitudes, opinions, and values

Discrimination

Occurs when employment decisions about an individual are based on reasons not associated with performance or related to the job

Affirmative Action

An intervention aimed at giving management a chance to correct an imbalance, injustice, mistake, or outright discrimination that occured in the past

Managing Diversity

Enables people to perform to their maximum potential

Access-and-Legitimacy Perspective

Diversity is based in the recognition that the organization’s markets and constituencies are culturally diverse

Glass Ceiling

Identifies an invisible but absolute barrier that prevents women from advancing to higher-level positions

Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA)

Prohibits discrimination against those with disabilities and requires organizations to reasonably accommodate an individual’s disabilities

Underemployed

Working at jobs that require less education than they have

Diversity Climate

Subcomponent of an organization’s overall climate, and is defined as the employee’s aggregate “perceptions about the organization’s diversity-related formal structure characteristics and informal values”

Psychological Safety

Reflects the extent to which people feel free to express their ideas and beliefs without fear of negative consequences

On-ramping

Programs encourage people to re-enter the workforce after a temporary career break

Ethnocentrism

Based on the feeling that our cultural rules and norms are superior to or more appropriate than the rules and norms of another culture