Deck 3: Perception and Learning in Organizations

Question 1

Seeing a trend in a sequence of sales figures involves the process of categorical thinking.

Answer 1

True

Question 2

A person's expectations make them more sensitive to incoming information, but also less sensitive to unexpected information.

Answer 2

True

Question 3

Social identity theory explains the dynamics of social perception.

Answer 3

True

Question 4

The social identity process includes categorization and attribution activities.

Question 5

A person's social identity is a complex combination of his or her memberships in many groups.

Question 6

Our emotions influence what we recognize or screen out.

Question 7

Selective attention occurs after incoming information is organized and interpreted.

Question 8

Grouping people and objects into recognizable patterns is part of the selective attention process.

Question 9

Confirmation bias causes us to screen out information that is contrary to our values and assumptions.

Question 10

Social identity theory explains why we see unique characteristics in everyone else but not in ourselves.

Question 11

People have a natural and conscious tendency to seek out information that supports their self-concept.

Question 12

Mental models that give us a rich understanding of one's environment may cause us to screen out or ineffectively organize information in another environment.

Question 13

Most categorical thinking occurs without our awareness.

Question 14

Social identity is a comparative process, and that comparison begins with categorical thinking.

Question 15

Categorical thinking is mostly a conscious process of deciding what information in the environment to notice.

Question 16

We are more likely to notice objects with features that are repetitive, intense and in motion.

Question 17

Employees can break out of their existing mental models by working with colleagues from diverse backgrounds that bring different mental models to the workplace.

Question 18

Homogenization and differentiation are two activities in the process of forming and maintaining our social identity.

Question 19

Social identity theory states that we define ourselves in terms of our differences with people who belong to other social categories.

Question 20

The perceptual process begins by attributing behavior to internal or external causes.

Question 21

Stereotyping is partly responsible for prejudice and discrimination.

Question 22

Self-fulfilling prophecy may result in either better or worse performance than if the employee is not exposed to the self-fulfilling prophecy effect.

Question 23

People tend to make an internal attribution about someone's behavior if that person has rarely acted like this either in the past or in other situations.

Question 24

Fundamental attribution error would cause a supervisor to believe that an employee's lateness is due to factors beyond the employee's control rather than to a lack of motivation to attend work.

Question 25

Social perception is influenced by three activities in the process of forming and maintaining our social identity: learning, stereotyping, and reinforcement.

Question 26

You are more likely to make an internal attribution about someone's poor performance if you have also observed the person performing that task poorly in the past and have observed other employees performing the task well.

Question 27

Stereotyping is a natural process that helps us to economize mental effort.

Question 28

Self-serving bias is the tendency to take credit for our successes and blame others or the situation for our mistakes.

Question 29

The easiest way to minimize stereotyping is by preventing the activation of stereotypes in our heads.

Question 30

We can eliminate the activation of stereotyping by choosing to ignore stereotypic information.

Question 31

Self-fulfilling prophecy tends to have a stronger effect on employees who are new to the job than on employees who have worked in that job for a few years.

Question 32

Attribution theory mainly explains the selective attention process.

Question 33

The first step in a self-fulfilling prophecy occurs when the observer acts differently towards people with whom he or she has high expectations than towards those with whom he or she has low expectations.

Question 34

Stereotyping is an extension of the social identity process.

Question 35

People who believe that their successful completion of a project is due to their skill and hard work are making an internal attribution.

Question 36

When making an internal or external attribution about a person's behavior, we tend to look at whether the person has acted this way in the past and other situations and whether other people act similarly in this situation.

Question 37

Employee satisfaction with work accomplishments is influenced to a large degree by whether they take credit for those accomplishments or attribute the success to external causes.

Question 38

One problem with stereotyping is that few traits assigned to a particular social category accurately describe every person identified with that group.

Question 39

Fundamental attribution error refers to the tendency to attribute the behavior of other people to internal factors more than external factors.

Question 40

Self-fulfilling prophecy occurs whenever supervisors accurately predict the future performance of recently hired employees.

Question 41

According to the halo effect, a supervisor's initial expectations of you influence your behavior so that you are more likely to act consistently with those expectations.

Question 42

The primacy effect causes interviewers to ignore information presented at the beginning of the interview and to pay more attention to information presented later in the interview.

Question 43

The primacy effect occurs because we have a strong need to quickly make sense of other people.

Question 44

The recency effect has occurred when a person's annual performance evaluation is heavily influenced by performance results over the last month.

Question 45

Interacting with people from other backgrounds is more likely to minimize perceptual biases when these people have equal status with you throughout the interaction.

Question 46

The main objective of the Johari Window process is to maintain the same amount of information about your self in each of the four quadrants.

Question 47

Diversity awareness programs are designed specifically to correct deep-rooted prejudice and intolerance in the workplace.

Question 48

Primacy and recency effects are two attribution errors.

Question 49

One of the most effective ways to minimize negative self-fulfilling prophecy is to make managers aware of the power of positive expectations.

Question 50

People who learn to empathize with others are less likely to engage in attribution errors.

Question 51

Tacit knowledge is best learned through formal classroom instruction.

Question 52

The four areas of the Johari Window are open, closed, internal and external.

Question 53

The Johari Window is a training program that teaches employees how to change their personality.

Question 54

The more we interact with someone, the more we rely on stereotypes to understand that individual.

Question 55

Diversity awareness programs mainly educate employees about the value of diversity and the problems with stereotyping.

Question 56

The contact hypothesis states that the more individuals interact with one another, the less they rely on stereotypes to perceive each other.

Question 57

According to the Johari Window, the hidden area is reduced through disclosure.

Question 58

When people empathize with others, it leads to a higher likelihood of the occurrence of attribution errors.

Question 59

The halo effect occurs when one characteristic of a person shapes our general impression of that person which, in turn, biases our perceptions about the other characteristics of that person.

Question 60

The only way to know whether an employee has learned something is if there is a relatively permanent change in the employee's behavior.

Question 61

Mental models are __________ that guide perceptions and behavior.

A)stereotypes
B)forms of punishment
C)self-fulfilling prophecies
D)broad world views
E)action learning practices

Question 62

Tacit knowledge is mainly learned through observation and experience.

Question 63

Behavior modification emphasizes human thoughts rather than the environment as the source of all learning.

Question 64

Organizational learning is not dependent on individual learning since it mostly involves the organization managing its own knowledge-based assets.

Question 65

Our likelihood of noticing a person or object depends on its:

A)novelty
B)intensity
C)motion
D)size
E)all of the above

Question 66

Mental models cause us to:

A)perceive events as though people are acting on a theatrical stage.
B)select and organize stimuli in ways that are consistent with our broad worldviews.
C)believe the behavior of others is caused more by their ability or motivation than the situation.
D)perceive ourselves as members of several groups that are different from people in other groups.
E)change our personality whenever we develop new mental models.

Question 67

The process of assigning traits to people based on their membership in a social category refers to:

A)recency effect.
B)halo effect.
C)projection bias.
D)empathy.
E)stereotyping.

Question 68

According to social identity theory, people tend to:

A)perceive themselves as members of several groups.
B)perceive that their own actions are due to the situation, whereas the behaviors of other people are mainly due to their motivation and ability.
C)believe that people in their own groups share common traits and people in comparison groups share a different set of traits.
D)do all of the above.
E)do only 'A' and 'C'.

Question 69

Negative reinforcement occurs when the introduction of a consequence increases or maintains the frequency or future probability of a behavior.

Question 70

________ is the process of filtering information received by our senses.

A)Personal identity
B)Social learning
C)Projection
D)Stereotyping
E)Selective attention

Question 71

Which of the following is an example of selective attention?

A)You notice that two employees are arguing in the company's quiet library.
B)You conclude that the person near the cash register is a sales clerk.
C)You assume that an employee is lazy because she works in a department with lazy people.
D)All of the answers are correct.
E)None of the answers apply.

Question 72

Which of the following refers to the process of receiving information about and making sense of the world around us?

A)Personality
B)Stereotyping
C)Reinforcement theory
D)Perception
E)Social identity

Question 73

Punishment decreases the frequency of future behavior whereas negative reinforcement increases or maintains the frequency of future behavior.

Question 74

Social identity theory says that:

A)we define ourselves in terms of our membership in certain groups and our differences with people who belong to other groups.
B)we tend to believe our own actions are caused by motivation or ability rather than the situation.
C)our expectations about another person cause that person to act in a way that is consistent with those expectations.
D)we quickly form an opinion of people based on the first information we receive about them.
E)our emotions screen out large blocks of information that threaten our beliefs and values.

Question 75

According to the perceptual process model, what happens immediately after environmental stimuli are received by our senses?

A)We organize the information into categories.
B)We form an attitude towards the source of the information.
C)We engage in behaviors in response to the environmental stimuli.
D)We filter the information through the selective attention process.
E)We form attributions and other interpretations of the information.

Question 76

Selective attention is a component of:

A)attribution theory.
B)the perceptual process.
C)the Johari Window.
D)social learning theory.
E)the self-fulfilling prophecy model.

Question 77

According to social learning theory, people can reinforce their own behavior.

Question 78

Continuous reinforcement provides the most rapid learning of the targeted behavior.

Question 79

_______ is the mostly unconscious process of organizing people and objects into preconceived categories that are stored in our long-term memory.

A)Mental models
B)Social identity
C)Categorical thinking
D)Personal identity
E)Reinforcement theory

Question 80

Companies with a strong learning orientation warn employees that mistakes will not be tolerated.