Selective Perception

Favoritism within a group, also known as bias within a group, bias within a group, bias within a group, or preference within a group, is a pattern of preference among group members over members of an outgroup. [Sources: 3]

In many different contexts, people act more prosocial towards members of their own group than towards members of their group. For this reason, beliefs about reciprocity are influenced by both group membership and interdependence, so that people have higher expectations of reciprocity from their group members, and this leads to intragroup favoritism (Locksley et al., 1980). If within-group favoritism arises from social preferences based on depersonalization in which the in-group is included, the individuals who most strongly identify with their group should also be those who act more prosocially towards the members of the in-group. Moreover, the social identity perspective suggests that intragroup bias should be stronger among people who identify more strongly with their nation as a social group. [Sources: 7, 8]

There are several theories that explain why prejudice appears in a group, but the most important one is called the social identity theory. However, over the years, research on group bias has shown that group membership affects our perceptions on a very basic level, even if people are divided into different groups based on completely meaningless criteria. [Sources: 10]

The classic study showing the strength of this bias was conducted by psychologists Michael Billig and Henry Tiffel. Consistent with this view, participants who tended to set themselves up against others more through social comparisons exhibited a stronger affirmative bias: they might feel more challenged by the idea that the other group might be right about politics. These results contradict other researchers’ findings that intragroup bias stems from simple group membership. [Sources: 8, 10]

Instead of automatically arising wherever a group is formed, it may be that group favoritism only arises when people expect their good deeds to be rewarded by members of their group. The strength of this influence can, of course, vary greatly, and it may or may not be that a real negative perspective manifests itself in relation to those who are not part of the group. The similarity bias reflects the human tendency to focus on ourselves and give preference to those who are like us. Group bias is, in fact, the way that managers can show favoritism in their judgments. [Sources: 5, 10]

Particularly positive reviews are received by those who were lucky enough to get into “their” executive circle, and those who are not included in this circle – no. For example, a teacher may have a favorite student because he is opposed to favoritism in the group. Selective perception can refer to any number of cognitive biases in psychology related to how expectations affect perception. [Sources: 0, 5]

Human judgment and decision making is distorted by a range of cognitive, perceptual, and motivational biases, and people tend to be unaware of their own bias, although they tend to easily recognize (and even overestimate) the effect of bias in human judgment from part of their prejudices. other. People exhibit this bias when they selectively collect or recall information, or when they interpret it in a distorted way. The effect is stronger for emotionally charged issues and deeply rooted beliefs. [Sources: 0, 2]

Misinterpretation This type of bias explains that people interpret evidence against their existing beliefs, usually evaluating corroborating evidence differently than evidence that refutes their prejudice. To minimize this dissonance, people adjust to confirmation bias by avoiding information that contradicts their beliefs and looking for evidence to support their beliefs. Home messages. Confirmation bias is the tendency of people to give preference to information that corroborates their existing beliefs or assumptions. In other words, selective perception is a form of bias because we interpret information according to our existing values ​​and beliefs. [Sources: 0, 2]

Although we should strive to be as fair as possible in our judgments, in fact we all have biases that affect our judgments. Managers are of course no exception. Many common misunderstandings affect their evaluation of employees. The most common ones are stereotype, selective perception, confirmation bias, first impression bias, novelty bias, minor bias, intra-group bias, and similarity bias. [Sources: 5]

While a particular stereotype about a social group may not fit an individual person, people tend to remember stereotyped information better than any evidence to the contrary (Fyock & Stangor, 1994). Hence, the stereotype is automatically activated in the presence of the stereotypical group member and can influence the thinking and behavior of the perceiver. However, people whose personal beliefs reject bias and discrimination may try to deliberately suppress the influence of the stereotype in their thoughts and behavior. [Sources: 2, 4]

Therefore, if implicit stereotypes indicate a potentially uncontrollable cognitive bias, the question arises of how to account for its results when making decisions, especially for a person who is sincerely striving for an unbiased judgment. Confirmation bias also affects professional diversity, as preconceived notions about different social groups can discriminate (albeit unconsciously) and influence the recruitment process (Agarwal, 2018). Another disturbing finding is that intra-group prejudice and associated prejudice are manifested in people from an early age. [Sources: 2, 4, 10]

This study found that although both women and men had more favorable outlooks than women, prejudice in the female group was 4.5 times stronger [25] than in men, and only women (not men) showed a cognitive balance between intragroup prejudice, identity and self-esteem, showing that men lack a mechanism that reinforces automatic gender preference. In another series of studies conducted in the 1980s by Jennifer Crocker and colleagues using the minimal group paradigm, people with high self-esteem who experienced self-esteem threats showed greater bias within the group compared to people with low self-esteem. who have suffered from threats to their self-esteem. On the other hand, researchers may have used inappropriate self-esteem measures to test the link between self-esteem and intragroup bias (global personal self-esteem, not specific social self-esteem). [Sources: 3]

Like self-serving bias, group attribution can have a self-improvement function, making people feel better by creating favorable explanations for their in-group behavior. Group service bias, sometimes called late attribution error, describes the tendency to make internal attributions on our successes within the group and external attributions on their failures, and to do the opposite attribution model on our external groups (Taylor & Doria, 1981). We are also often biased towards group services when we make more favorable attributions about our internal groups than about our external groups. [Sources: 1]

But prejudice within the group is not only friendly to our group; it can also be harmful to our outside group. If the prejudice of the service group can explain most of the cross-cultural differences in attribution, then in this case, when the author is an American, the Chinese should be more likely to accuse members of outside groups for internal attribution, while Americans There should be more external and less impact on members. Your internal group. Looking at the results of previous empirical research on social identity views that support intra-group bias in selective news reporting, it is clear that low-level groups in particular exhibit this bias (Appiah et al., 2013; Knobloch-Westerwick & Hastall, 2010)-perhaps The other countries represented do not appear to be a sufficiently relevant comparison group for American participants, or to them do not represent a higher-status group that can initiate internal groups, as in these previous studies. [Sources: 1, 8, 10]

— Slimane Zouggari

 

 

##### Sources #####

[0]: https://theintactone.com/2018/12/16/cb-u2-topic-9-selective-perception-common-perceptions-of-colours/

[1]: https://opentextbc.ca/socialpsychology/chapter/biases-in-attribution/

[2]: https://www.simplypsychology.org/confirmation-bias.html

[3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In-group_favoritism

[4]: https://www.nature.com/articles/palcomms201786

[5]: https://courses.lumenlearning.com/suny-principlesmanagement/chapter/common-management-biases/

[6]: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/bias

[7]: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4327620/

[8]: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0093650217719596

[9]: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10670-020-00252-1

[10]: https://thedecisionlab.com/biases/in-group-bias/