Professional Documents
Culture Documents
CHAPTER FIVE
Perception, Cognition,
and Emotion
Perception
Perception is:
• The process by which individuals connect to
their environment.
• A “sense-making” process
McGraw-Hill/Irwin ©2006 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., All Rights Reserved
5-4
Perceptual Distortion
Selective Perception
and Projection
• Selective perception:
– Perpetuates stereotypes or halo effects
– The perceiver singles out information that supports a prior
belief but filters out contrary information
• Projection:
– Arises out of a need to protect one’s own self-concept
– People assign to others the characteristics or feelings that
they possess themselves
Framing
• Frames:
– Represent the subjective mechanism through which people
evaluate and make sense out of situations
– Lead people to pursue or avoid subsequent actions
– Focus, shape and organize the world around us
– Make sense of complex realities
– Define a person, event or process
– Impart meaning and significance
Types of Frames
• Substantive
• Outcome
• Aspiration
• Process
• Identity
• Characterization
• Loss-Gain
Cognitive Biases
• Irrational escalation of • The winner’s curse
commitment • Overconfidence
• Mythical fixed-pie • The law of small
beliefs numbers
• Anchoring and • Self-serving biases
adjustment • Endowment effect
• Issue framing and risk • Ignoring others’
cognitions
• Availability of
• Reactive devaluation
information
McGraw-Hill/Irwin ©2006 The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc., All Rights Reserved
5-16
Availability of Information
and the Winner’s Curse
• Availability of information
– Operates when information that is presented in vivid or
attention-getting ways becomes easy to recall.
– Becomes central and critical in evaluating events and
options
• The winner’s curse
– The tendency to settle quickly on an item and then
subsequently feel discomfort about a win that comes too
easily
Overconfidence and
The Law of Small Numbers
• Overconfidence
– The tendency of negotiators to believe that their ability to
be correct or accurate is greater than is actually true
• The law of small numbers
– The tendency of people to draw conclusions from small
sample sizes
– The smaller sample, the greater the possibility that past
lessons will be erroneously used to infer what will happen
in the future
Confidence or Overconfidence?
We came to Iceland to advance the cause of peace. . .and
though we put on the table the most far-reaching arms
control proposal in history, the General Secretary
rejected it.
President Ronald Reagan to reporters,
following completion of presummit arms control discussions
in Reykjavik, Iceland, on October 12, 1986.
Self-Serving Biases
and Endowment Effect
• Self-serving biases
– People often explain another person’s behavior by making
attributions, either to the person or to the situation
– The tendency, known as fundamental attribution error, is
to:
• Overestimate the role of personal or internal factors
• Underestimate the role of situational or external factors
• Endowment effect
– The tendency to overvalue something you own or believe
you possess