Perception

Perception
➢ Perception means perceiving i.e, giving
meaning to the environment around us.
Definitions:
➢ Stephen P. Robbins defined perception is a process by
which individuals organize and interpret their sensory
impressions in order to give meaning to their
environment.
➢ Fred Luthans opines that perception is an important
mediating cognitive process through which persons make
interpretations of the stimulus or situation they are faced
with.
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 What is the perceptual process?

➢ Perception.
– The process by which people select, organize,
interpret, retrieve, and respond to information.
– Perceptual information is gathered from:
• Sight.
• Hearing.
• Touch.
• Taste.
• Smell.

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 Perception
Figure do we see a white wine glass or a white table leg
against a non-white background or do we visualise two
persons facing each other against a white background?

Is the Figure a White Vase (or goblet, or bird-bath?

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 What is the perceptual process?

➢ Factors influencing the perceptual process.

– Characteristics of the perceiver.

– Characteristics of the setting.

– Characteristics of the perceived.

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 What is the perceptual process?

➢ Characteristics of the perceiver.

– The perceptual process is influenced by the
perceiver’s:
• Past experiences.
• Needs or motives.
• Personality.
• Values and attitudes.

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 What is the perceptual process?

➢ Characteristics of the setting.

– The perceptual process is influenced by the
setting’s:
• Physical context.
• Social context.
• Organizational context.

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 What is the perceptual process?

➢ Characteristics of the perceived.

– The perceptual process is influenced by characteristics
of the perceived person, object, or event, such as:
• Contrast.
• Intensity.
• Figure-ground separation.
• Size.
• Motion.
• Repetition or novelty.

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 What is the perceptual process?

➢ Stages of the perceptual process.

– Information attention and selection.
– Organization of information.
– Information interpretation.
– Information retrieval.

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 What is the perceptual process?

➢ Information attention and selection.

– Selective screening.
• Lets in only a tiny proportion all the information
that bombards a person.
– Two types of selective screening.
• Controlled processing.
• Screening without perceiver’s conscious
awareness.

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 What is the perceptual process?

➢ Organization of information.
– Schemas.
• Cognitive frameworks that represent organized knowledge
about a given concept or stimulus developed through
experience.
– Types of schemas.
• Self schemas.
• Person schemas.
• Script schemas.
• Person-in-situation schemas.

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 What is the perceptual process?

➢ Information interpretation.
– Uncovering the reasons behind the ways
stimuli are grouped.
– People may interpret the same information
differently or make different attributions about
information.

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 What is the perceptual process?

➢ Information retrieval.
– Attention and selection, organization, and
interpretation are part of memory.
– Information stored in memory must be
retrieved in order to be used.

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 What is the perceptual process?

➢ Response to the perceptual process.

– Thoughts.

– Feelings.

– Actions.

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 What are common
perceptual distortions?
➢ Common perceptual distortions include:
– Stereotypes or prototypes.
– Halo effects.
– Selective perception.
– Projection.
– Contrast effects.
– Self-fulfilling prophecy.

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 What are common
perceptual distortions?
➢ Stereotypes or prototypes.
– Combines information based on the category
or class to which a person, situation, or object
belongs.
– Strong impact at the organization stage
– Individual differences are obscured.

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 What are common
perceptual distortions?
➢ Halo effects.
– Occur when one attribute of a person or single
characteristics or situation is used to develop
an overall impression of the individual or
situation.
– Likely to occur in the organization stage.
– Individual differences are obscured.
– Important in the performance appraisal
process.
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 What are common
perceptual distortions?
➢ Selective perception.
– The tendency to single out those aspects of a
situation, person, or object that are consistent
with one’s needs, values, or attitudes.
– Strongest impact is at the attention stage.
– Perception checking with other persons can
help counter the adverse impact of selective
perception.

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 What are common
perceptual distortions?
➢ Projection.
– The assignment of one’s personal attributes to
other individuals.
– Especially likely to occur in interpretation
stage.
– Projection can be controlled through a high
degree of self-awareness and empathy.

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 What are common
perceptual distortions?
➢ Contrast effects.

– Occur when an individual is compared to other

people on the same characteristics on which

the others rank higher or lower.

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 What are common
perceptual distortions?
➢ Self-fulfilling prophecy.
– The tendency to create or find in another
situation or individual that which one expected
to find.
– Can have either positive or negative outcomes.
– Managers should adopt positive and optimistic
approaches to people at work.

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 How can the perceptual
process be managed?
➢ Impression management.
– A person’s systematic attempt to behave in
ways that create and maintain desired
impressions in others’ eyes.
– Successful managers:
• Use impression management to enhance their own
images.
• Are sensitive to other people’s use of impression
management.
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 How can the perceptual
process be managed?
➢ Distortion management.
– Managers should:
• Balance automatic and controlled information
processing at the attention and selection stage.
• Broaden their schemas at the organizing stage.
• Be attuned to attributions at the interpretation
stage.

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 Attribution Theory: Why People Behave as they do?

• This is a theory about how people explain things. Attribution refers to

the way people try to understand the behaviour of others (depending
on what meaning we attribute to a given behaviour). When we begin
to explain why things have happened in a certain way, we may
submit, “the devil made me do it” (external attribution. Attributing
the outcome to an outside agent or force) or we may admit “I am
guilty, grant me forgiveness” (internal attribution, claiming
responsibility for the event).
• According to Attribution Theory, (Kelly), three factors influence
this internal or external determination.
• Distinctiveness considers how consistent a person’s behaviour is
across different situations.
• Consensus examines how likely all those facing a similar situation
are to respond in the same way.
• Consistency considers whether an individual responds the same
way across time. 24
• Attribution Errors
• Research evidence suggests that when we made judgements about the
behaviour of other people, we tend to underestimate the influence of
external factors and overestimate the influence of internal or personal
factors. This is called the fundamental attribution error (the
tendency to attribute the behaviour of other people more to internal
than to external factors) this partly explains why a sales manager is
prone to attribute the poor performance of his salesman to laziness
rather than the new product line introduced by a competitor.
• How to develop Perceptual Skills?
• Though there are no set formulas to develop the perceptual abilities,
some guidelines can definitely help promote the skills of the
perceiver.
• Avoid perceptual distortion
• Make accurate self-perception
• Put yourself in another person’s place
• Create a good impression about yourself 25