Hy Diaries

1. Apply your knowledge of stereotyping and social identity theory to explain what went wrong here. 

Stereotyping is the process of assigning traits to people on the basis of their membership in a social category. Stereotypes generally have some inaccuracies, some overestimation or underestimation of real differences, and some degree of accuracy.

One problem with stereotyping is that stereotypes under certain conditions, such as the degree to which they interact with people in that group. The greatest concern is that stereotyping lays the foundation for prejudice that is unfounded negative emotions toward people belonging to a particular stereotyped group. Stereotyping could aslo be partly responsible for sexual harrasment that is the unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature that detrimentally affects the work environment or leads to adverse job-related consequences for victims. 

Social identity theory explains the process of self-percpetion and social perception. The theory proposes that people develop their perceptions through personal identity and social identity. Personal identity includes the individul’s unique characteristic and experiences such as physical appearance, personality traits and special talents.

Social identity refers to a person’s self-perception as memberships in various social groups. Social identity theory explains the dynamics of siocial perception such as how we perceive others.

It is a comparative process,meaning that we define ourselves terms of our differences with people who belong to groups. People tend to homogenize others within social categories. Stereotypes developing from the grouping of traits.

 2. What other perceptual error is apparent in this case study? 

The other perceptual error in this case study is the halo effect that can occurs when general impression of a person, usually based on one prominent characteristics, dissorts our perception of other characteristics of that person.

If a supervisor who values punctuality notices that an employee is sometimes late for work, the supervisor might form a negative image of the employee and evaluate that person’s other traits unfavorably as well. The halo effect is most likely to occur when concrete information about the perceived target is missing or we are not sufficiently motivated to search for it. Instead, we use our general empression of the person to fill on the missing information. Not only that, the primacy effect also occur in this case study that is our tendency to quickly form an opinion of people on the basis of the first information we receive about them. This rapid perceptual organization and intrepretation occurs because we need to make sense of the world around us. 

The problem is that first impressions is particularly negative first impressions are difficult to change.

After categorizing someone, we tend to select subsequent information that supports our first impression and screen out information that opposes that impression. Next, the recency effect that occurs when the most recent information dominates our perceptions. This perceptual bias is most common when people especially those with limited experience are making an evaluation involving complex information. For instance, auditors must digest large volumes of information in their judgements about financial documents and the most recent information received prior to the decision tends to get weighted more heavily than information received at the beginning of the audit. 

Similarly, when supervisors evaluate the performance of employees over the previous year the most recent performance information dominates the evaluation because it is the most easily recalled.

Lastly is false-consensus effect or sometimes called the similar-to-me effect, the false-consensus effect is a widely observed bias in which we overestimate the extent to which others have beliefs and characteristics similar to our own. Employees who are thinking of quitting their jobs believe that a large percentage of their co-workers are also thinking about quitting. This bias occurs to some extent because we associate with others who are similar to us, and we selectively remember information that is consistent with our own views. We also believe every one does it to einforce our self-concept regarding behaviors that do not have a positive image . 

3. What can organizations do to minimize misperceptions in these types of situations?

For this situation, one of the most obvious and widely practiced ways to reduce perceptual biases is by knowing that they exist such as diversity awareness training tries to minimize discrimination by making people aware of systematic discrimination as well as prejudices that occur through stereotyping that attempts to dispel myths about people from various cultural and demographic groups.

It can reduce these biases to some extent by making people more mindful of their thought and action. The other ways to minimize misperceptions is by improving self-awareness that more powerful way to minimize perceptual biases is to help people become more aware of biases in their own decisions and behavior. 

We need to understand our beliefs, values and attitudes to be more open-minded and nonjudgmental toward others.

Self-awareness is equally important in other ways. Not only that, they also can be use the ways of meaningful interaction that people who interact with each other will be less prejudiced or perceptually biased against each other. Meaningful interaction might occur in many of the international volunteering activities and does more than reduce our reliance on stereotypes. It also potentially improves empathy towards others that is extent to which we understand and are sensitive to the feelings, thoughts and situations of others.

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