The Essay Explores Entitativity

Factors Impacting Perception

Discuss about the Central Role of Entitativity in Stereotypes.

Everyone has their own perception and thinking about a particular event. It is not necessary that every person perceive the similar events identically. There can be difference in the perception of different people. This is because perception portrays the thought processes of the person or it can be said that the way a person thinks is the base of what he will perceive about a particular event (Young, Hellawell and Hay, 2013). Perception designed the behaviour or the response of the person to a particular situation or stimuli. This is reason why behaviour and response of the person also differs with the difference in their personality and thinking. When many of the individual faces any situation, he used to organize the information he observes and then process it to take out an outcome. The difference in their process of aligning and assessing the information makes the people different (Walker-Smith, Gale and Findlay, 2013).

There are many factors that can affect the change in perception of the people at personal life as well as on the workplace. These are the factors related to the vicinity environment of the people. As the environment changes, it may be possible that the perception of an individual towards a particular thing or event can also change (Gibson, 2014). The attitude and the behaviour of the person also results in biasness in perception. As the individual makes a perception about an event, they become bias as well. Some of the factors are discussed below that leads to distortion in the perception and biasness in the mature of the people (Broadbent, 2013):

Selective perception is the first and the major factor that affect perception of the individual. Everyone receives large amount of information from the outside stimuli. It is not possible for the individual to observe everything or assesse very information (Slovic, 2016). Thus, the final behaviour of the person demands on what that person has selected to observe from the information. This selective information forms the selective perception of the person. At the same time, it is possible that another individual have selected different type of information from the same stimuli and thus have different perception from the first person (Krishna, 2012). Selective tendency lead to biasness because the individual used to observe the information according to his comfort and ideas. In this type of selection, the individual looks only for the information he believes in and thus leads to biased decisions. Another factor that can affect the perception of the individual is stereotype. It can be defined as the generalized thinking that has been framed by an individual for a particular group of people (Chen and Tsai, 2007). When an individual judges a person belongs to a particular group than the shortcut method of stereotyping is used to make the perception. Stereotyping allow the people to manage the small amount of information available for a particular type of people. It is very simple method of evaluating others by looking for the characteristics of the group they belongs to. It is very common method to be used from making perception (Mancini, Longo, Kammers and Haggard, 2011). However, it is common does not mean that it can be accepted as the universal method and is always correct. It can develop errors or distort the perceptions from truth.  At the workplace, stereotype develops negative results. This is because the whole group is perceived to be of a particular kind only by assessing or interacting with a particular person from the group (Spencer-Rodgers, Hamilton and Sherman, 2007). It is not necessary that the person can represent the whole group by his views. There can be different views and attitude of the people in a single group as well. Sometime the perception of the individual can be made only by judging only one traits of the person. This method of making perceptions is called Halo effect. It is the effect that results in perception by only one trait of the individual and assuming that the other traits are also associated with this trait only. For example, if a girl is beautiful and attractive, the boss perceived that she is intelligent and god performer (Hu and Lindemann, 2009). Later on he realized that he is not good in typing. This is the perception error he has in his mind because of the one trait of that girl that is beauty. Halo effect creates error in the perception nada los creates biasness (Hu and Lindemann, 2009). As in the above case, the boss thinks that beauty means intelligence which is the wrong perception. Beauty is different trait and intelligence is very different. It is saying that “first impression is the last impression”. This is because when a person met another person first time, he perceives something from his personality and then it becomes his perception for that person for life time. This is not always true and thus first impression can also distort the person and create biasness. It is very difficult for the individual to change the first impression they had on another person. But that does not mean that if a person has been arrogant at the time when he was observed by another person is arrogant in nature (Sikdar and Mitra, 2012. It depends on the situation when the two people met or confront each other. There may be another reason behind such behaviour of the person. Therefore, making a perception only by judging the person’s first impression is also wrong. Contrast effect can be learnt in this context of making perception. Contrast effects are the effects that are very different from the environment and draw the attention of other. This also helps in making or creating the perception for a person. Projection is another factor that can alter the perception of the people. The next factor that can be considered to have an impact of the perception is the projection. Projection refers to perceiving others as own. The people who believe in projection perceive the individual as what they like to perceive and what they are rather than whet that person is. This is a very wrong way of perceiving others as this have many errors. There are many implicit theories of individual that support them to have perceptions. These theories are made by tem only and this decides their way to perceive other person. These theories can be correct for one person but may get wrong for different person and thus create distortion in the perception (Nosek, Smyth, Sriram, Lindner, Devos, Ayala, Bar-Anan, Bergh, Cai, Gonsalkorale and Kesebir, 2009).

Selective Perception

Distortion in the perception is the very big issue and this needs to be overcome by the people in their personal as well as professional life. This is because distortion or wrong perception about any individual may lead to harmful effects for them. There are many ways in which an individual can improve or correct their perception process in their personal life. The first way is to improve self-perception. Self-perception is based on self-esteem and it is very personal that it cannot be judge as wrong or right (Hammi, Samp, Rémuzat, Auray, Lamure, Aballéa, Kooli, Akhras and Toumi, 2014). The individual himself has to identify the negative and positive of his perception process and then try to overcome the negative part so that this factor may not distort his perceptions. Avoiding schemata is another way to resolve this issue. Schemata means the set of information perceived or observed by the person that becomes the basis for that person to perceive others. Following the pattern every time in perceiving others result in distortion and the individual should avoid this. There are many environmental factors such as society, family etc. that affect our thinking process and perceptions towards a particular event. It is very necessary fir the person to be critical in judging these social factors that affect the thinking. This is because these factors not only provide the positive perceptions but sometimes lead to develop negative perception that may be wrong. Sometimes, the people develop their own prophecies to judge anther individual. For example, there was a biology teacher in a school who belongs to China. Students thought that he would not be a good teacher as he does not know how to speak English properly (Pronin, 2008). This was a very wrong perception made by their own assumption that he belongs to China and cannot speak good English without actually experiencing his teaching. This made their perception wrong and distorted. Better communication and interaction making the people can resolve this issue. It is required by the people to communicate more with the people so that they can better judge them by assessing al their qualities rather than making assumptions. If two people properly interact with each other, they get to know each other better and make their perception by assessing the actual traits of the person. There will be no other environmental factor that can affect their thought process that time. If a person chooses his or her life partner, they took time to know each other rather then deciding after one meeting. This is because interacting and communicating with each there helps them to develop better understanding.

Stereotype

It is not only in personal life but at the workplace also, this issue of distortion in perception generates. At organizational level, it is very important to have correct perception in order to make better decisions for the human resource of the organization. Any distortion in the minds of the manager about a person can lead to wrong decision of promotion or demotion and thus can affect a person’s life very badly (Pronin, 2007). At the organizations, the management of the company has to take many decisions regarding training, promotion, Pay scale etc. this decision shouldn’t be made on assumptions and should be made on assessing all the factors and the traits of the employees. The management should implement some of the strategies such as 360 degree analysis, interviews, and other evaluation techniques to judge the person. This is because these techniques where all the employees of the organization participate and all the factors of the organization are considered can only lead to better and efficient decision. An example can be taken in order to understand the concept better. Suppose, if a manager has to choose a team leader in his team. He used the method of stereotype and selected the person who belongs to an educated family to be a team leader. This is his perception that the person belongs to a good and educated family that means he can be a team leader but in reality it was not the case. After sometime the manager realized that another person of the same team is doing very good in his work and have all the skills of leading the team (Moore and Small, 2007). This suggests that assessing the skills of the person is required to take such decision rather than the perceptions.

Perception are the part of an individual’s personality and thus it is not necessary that every person always perceive things right. It is also not important that every individual behave similarly in every situation and perceive similar thing about a particular person. Distortion in the perceptions is very common practice but it should be removed by the people in order to take better decision about others. It can be concluded that every individual should assess the environment and other factors that can help in making perceptions of the people.

References:

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Chen, C.F. and Tsai, D., 2007. How destination image and evaluative factors affect behavioral intentions?. Tourism management, 28(4), pp.1115-1122.

Gibson, J.J., 2014. The ecological approach to visual perception: classic edition. Psychology Press.

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Hu, G. and Lindemann, S., 2009. Stereotypes of Cantonese English, apparent native/non-native status, and their effect on non-native English speakers’ perception. Journal of Multilingual and Multicultural Development, 30(3), pp.253-269.

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