Introduction To Business Psychology

Attribution Process
The theory of personality that seeks to explain how we decide what are the causes of a person’s behavior on the basis of sample of his behaviors.
Attribution theory helps a person understand the causes of human behavior, be it their own or someone else's. The basis of attribution theory is that people want to know the reasons for the actions that they and others take; they want to attribute causes to behaviors they see rather than assuming that these behaviors are random. This allows people to assume some feeling of control over their own behaviors and over situations. For example an employee does a job well before time. So what is the cause behind this behavior? Is he a hard worker? Or having extra qualification about the specific job?
The general process we use to determine the causes of behavior proceeds in several steps.


Now we explain this diagram. Suppose a hardworking employee worked badly today. Here we noted this behavior. Then we interpret the behavior i.e. it gives some initial explanation (maybe he hadn’t slept last night.). Now if we have time, cognitive sources and motivation available to change or modify the initial explanation. Then we formulate and resolve the problem. If we are satisfied about our results then process stops and even is explained. If NO then we try again and again from the 3rd step.

Social Cognition:
The cognitive process by which people understand and make sense of others and themselves.
Every time we have much of information about something or people to describe them. We decide what is important and what is not in that particular thing or person. i.e. we make judgment about the characteristics of others.
How can we do this, because we have highly developed SCHEMAS? A set of cognition about people and social experience is called schemas. Schemas do three things.
A) It organizes the information which is stored in memory.
B) It represents them in our minds as the social world operates. And
C) It gives us a frame work to recognize, categorize and recall information relating to social stimuli such as people and other things.
We typically hold schemas for specific type of people. For example for teacher we have the schemas consist of a number of characteristics i.e. knowledge of the subject, the way he is teaching, his behavior towards the students etc. And for mother for example we have the schemas of characteristics such as Warmth, nurture-ness, caring, kind hearted etc.
All characteristics of schemas are not necessary to be true all the time but still it organize the way in which we recall, recognize and categorize information about others. Furthermore it help us to predict what other people are like on the basis of little information, because we tend to fit people into schemas we already have even if we do not have much information and any concrete evidence about them. for instance we often take a bad looking man by face as a man full of anger all time, although we had never seen him angry. Here in this situation our schemas about the person are wrong. So it is not necessary to have 100% true schemas for the people we do not have full information.

SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY
Persuasion:
It is the process of guiding someone toward the adoption of an idea, attitude, or action by rational and symbolic means. (Rational means: based on reasons) Or
Persuasion is the process of changing attitudes. Or
The deliberate attempt to influence the thoughts, feelings or behaviors of another
Everyday we are confronted by persuasion. Food makers want us to buy their newest products, while movie studios want us to go see the latest blockbusters. Food makers and other companies give ads and movie studios give posters in order to change our attitude. Say for example we are habitual to eat SUPER CRISP, now if LAYS gives ad about their new testy chips, LAYS indirectly changes our attitude of eating SUPER CRISP. Now we start eating LAYS. Lays changed our attitude through ads. But the changing attitude is really a hard job. It is not so easy to just give some ads and you will have a number of people of changed attitude. Changing attitude depends on a number of factors.

• Message Source:
The characteristics of a person or thing who delivers a persuasive message must have a good knowledge of the message. Communicators who are socially and physically attractive produce greater change of attitude then those who are less attractive. For example the poster of lays will attracts us if it has something interesting in it. Here the poster of lays is message source.

• Characteristics of the Message:
The change in attitude depends not only on the message source but also on the words and mean of the message. Generally two sided message is more effective then one sided message. Because two sided message have more information plus the message source detail then one sided message. In addition fear producing messages also work well. E.g. if you use used blades you will get AIDS, in this message we are told that not to use old blades but new ones. If we use, then we may have AIDS.

• Characteristic of the Target:
Message source has delivered the message, now it’s accepting and rejecting depends upon the Target, i.e. the people. For example intelligent people are hard to make to change attitude then less intelligent people. Moreover gender differences in persuasibility also seem to exist, e.g. in public places women are more likely to persuade then men.