Answer Happy

The Target A target's characteristics also affect what we perceive. Loud people are more likely to be noticed in a group than are quiet ones. So too are extremely attractive or unattractive individuals. Novelty, motion, sounds, size, and other characteristics of a target shape the way we see it. Because we don't look at targets in isolation, the relationship of a target to its background influences perception. For instance, we often perceive women, Aboriginal people, Asians, or members of any other group that has clearly distinguishable charac teristics as alike in other, unrelated ways as well. The Situation Context matters too. The time at which we see an object or event can influence atten- tion, as can location, light, heat, or any number of situational factors. For example, at a nightclub on Saturday night, you may not notice someone "decked out." Yet that same person so attired for your Monday morning management class would certainly catch your attention. Neither the perceiver nor the target changed between Saturday night and Monday morning, but the situation is different. Perceptual Errors Perceiving and interpreting why others do what they do takes time. As a result, we develop techniques to make this task more manageable. These techniques are frequently valuable-they allow us to make accurate perceptions rapidly and provide valid data for making predictions. However, they are not foolproof. They can and do get us into trouble. Some of the errors that distort the perception process are attribution theory, selective perception, halo effect, contrast effects, projection, and stereotyping. Can people be mistaken in their perceptions? Attribution Theory Whom do you tend to blame when someone makes a mistake? Ever wonder why? Attribution theory tries to explain the ways we judge people differently, depending on the meaning we attribute to a given behaviour. Basically, the theory suggests that when we observe what seems like atypical behaviour by an individual, we try to make sense of it. We consider whether the individual is responsible for the behaviour (the cause is internal), or whether something outside the individual caused the behaviour (the cause is external), Internally caused behaviours are those an observer believes to be under the personal behavioural control of another individual. Externally caused behaviours are what we imagine the situation forced the individual to do. For example, if a student is late for class, the instructor might attribute his lateness to partying into the wee hours of the morning and then oversleeping. This would be an internal attribution. But if the instructor assumes that a major automobile accident tied up traffic on the student's regular route to school, he or she is making an external attribution. In trying to determine whether behaviour is internally or externally caused, we rely on three rules about the behaviour: (1) distinctiveness, (2) consensus, and (3) consistency. Let's discuss each of these in turn. Distinctiveness Distinctiveness refers to whether an individual acts similarly across a variety of situations. Is the student who arrives late for class today also the one who is always goofing off in team meetings and not answering urgent emails? What we want to know is whether this behaviour is unusual. If it is, we are likely to give it an external attribution. If it's not, we will probably judge the behaviour to be internal.
Explain attribution theory, and list the three deter- minants of attribution.