The Perceptual Process

The perceptual process can be very deceiving to some people, for example, take a deep woods country boy from Arkansas and put him in New York or Los Angeles , everything he may have been taught growing up is flying around in his head fast enough to make him dizzy. That s because the setting in the perceptual process could be the most important ingredient in that process.

There are three ingredients to this process. The perceiver, which is the person forming an opinion about another based on many different things, such as values and attitudes. The perceiver, which is the person forming an opinion about another based on many different things, such as values and attitudes. The perceived , is the individual or object an opinion is being formed about, for example, a person with tattoos versus someone with none. The third and final ingredient is the setting. The setting could involve many different combinations of things to include where a conversation took place, for example. This leads into perpetual process management.

The process described in the text is much like what we are taught in the military. We are taught to always listen to the message the subordinate are trying to convey by their work performance. This leads into distortion management which involved a few different topics, the most common being stereotypes.

Common perpetual distortions include stereotypes or prototypes such as believing every individual from a certain race or religion are all lazy. Halo effects occur when an individual forms an opinion about another because of one certain attribute such as attitude. Selective perception is what occurs when an individual singles out something from another with his own needs in mind. There are few other common distortions that occur which I could go on about forever. Attribution theory and management concern identifying an individual s performance, for example, with either an outside source, such as a machine or an internal source, such as laziness. The management of such a attributions is not easy but a constant effort must be made to equalize external and internal so as to not give negative feedback automatically when not warranted.

Recently, an individual in charge of approximable twenty people made a racist comment. It was unwarranted and he could have handled it differently. The action taken by upper management is what puzzles everyone. The individual received no reprimand or a bad evaluation of performance. Now the individual is stating that certain things better be done or he will rtake action because he did not receive a bad evaluation. That was a situation where none of the topics discussed were implemented.