Perceived and Objective Realities Reality versus Perceptions

Reality versus Perceptions

Perceived and objective reality is two contrasting terms that most people find confusing; some use them to mean the same thing. However, the perceived reality is when one neglects facts, misinformation, and biases regarding what others believe in, and their perception is the reality (Hinsch et al., 2020). In contrast, objective reality is based on accurate and reliable factual concepts that apply to everyone. Even though there are objective and perceived realities, most people are influenced by the perceived realities due to reading them from books or even inheriting the knowledge from the preceding generations. This makes them believe their decisions are accurate and others should think in line with them.

Attribution theory

Attribution theory is mainly employed in the psychology of people as it is concerned with how ordinary people explain why they settle with a particular reality or their causes of events. Therefore this theory came about by describing how people with perceived realities use their information to arrive at a simple explanation for their events since it analyzes the information gathered and how the perceived reality has been used to arrive at the casual judgment (Spilka et al., 2019). Besides, the world is very complex and diverse. Most people are naïve psychologists who try to make sense of what they are experiencing in their surroundings, creating a cause-and-effect relationship even when non-existing. Besides, to elaborate precisely on the attribution theory, one must view it from either a dispositional or situational perspective. Disposition mainly entails the internal characteristics of an individual and how it influences their cause of behavior in that before making a judgment, one will factor in the personality traits. On the other side, situational attribution is based on outside personal control when assigning the cause of the behavior.

Therefore, attribution theory plays a significant role in the consistency of how one believes their perception is reality. A perfect example is when one is lying about them working, and because you see them every morning getting up for work, you tend to believe they are working because of their consistency. Shifting it to consensus perception, religion could be the best example because this is a union of people with a shared belief; hence they will have similar behaviors, opinions, and activities. The other side of attribution theory is about distinctiveness in that an individual need to use their perception of reality to identify their purpose as separate and how to distinguish things they believe is the reality

Bias

Bias is very diverse, and many people make conclusions based on their preferences. Therefore factoring the prejudice and perception of realities, many people are unaware of biases when perceiving other people's theories or opinions (McClain et al., 2021). This is very difficult to commemorate as preferences cannot be measured because one can be very biased towards someone without understanding how biased they are. For instance, in a working environment governed by ethics and codes of conduct, a particular employee feels their coworker is not performing his duties diligently, breaching the work's ethical behavior. If one is called to make a judgment and determine if the coworker is breaching work ethics, they have never worked together. It will be challenging to determine if they have good work ethics, but the decision they will arrive at is filled with biases. When making rational decisions, biases also play a significant role since one is supposed to select their choices and preferences. To do so, they will value one thing more than the other even though it performs the same functionality. For instance, being biased toward the employees at work because of how they groom themselves, not realizing they are offending that employee.

Bounded rationality

Humans make this decision to satisfy their needs rather than optimize them. This makes them make less viable decisions that seem good enough for that particular time than looking for the best possible solution (Weiner, 2018). Therefore, analyzing it from a comprehensive perspective can be classified under perception reality as it limits people to their potential, limiting it to the truth, for instance, in a workplace with many employees. Due to that large number, the manager could not have much information about all the employees and could instead listen to other employees to obtain information about that employee. Although this is a good technique for obtaining information, it isn't easy to ascertain whether what they are being told is true since the manager cannot verify it. In that scenario, the manager will listen to all the employees' points of view regarding that person. Sometimes could be influenced by biases and perceived as reality. This will make the manager rational decisions because he never spent more time finding accurate and sufficient information about the person, which might result in an error at work.

Cognitive biases

This is a systematic pattern of deviation from the norm that occurs when people are processing and interpreting information in their surroundings. As a result, it affects their decision-making. Even though the human brain is powerful, it is subjected to limitations probably due to insufficient knowledge when simplifying information, which affects the perception of reality (Kendra Cherry & Amy Morin, LCSW, 2020). For instance, numerous people converge to perform particular or similar tasks in the workplace. They come from different backgrounds; hence, they might have other characters, and some could be antisocial. Instead of the colleagues finding reasons behind the person's antisocial they become biased on how that person reacts to them. Instead, they judge based on their perceptions, which limits their rational decision-making because their colleague is antisocial.

Conjunction fallacy

This can be perceived as perception reality since it is prone to errors when making decisions. People judge a conjunction based on its popularity in that two possible events are more likely to be correct than one (McClain et al., 2021). For instance, assuming that someone is doing something while you have not confirmed if they are doing that thing with the assumption that if you believe in something, it must be happening. This will then influence the rational decision-making process, for instance, that a particular employee is doing drugs while you have never witnessed them with drugs. Even though you have never witnessed but your judgment makes you believe so.

Primacy and recency effects

This plays a significant role in the perceived reality as it makes one believe the information presented in the introduction and towards the conclusion is the one that is understood better than those shown in the middle. Also, it comes into play through believing the information you gathered in the past to be the only truth without understanding that data is defined differently daily and new theories come into play (Weiner, 2018). Therefore one might be holding a lot of lies and the recency effect is what they have learned recently, and they perceive that as the reality in believing it is the only truth available. This limits them to the number of facts they can hold and fiction they have perceived in their brains, influencing their decision-making process.

Selective perceptions

This is when people are very choosy and only acknowledge some of the perceptions and neglect others, limiting their judgment as they might fail to see what is wrong when a person is correct (Hinsch et al., 2020). This transforms in the workplace when the manager has their preferences based on their personalities, which limits them in realizing other employees' efforts towards obtaining the organization's goals. This makes the manager too comfortable with the employee and might even be unable to recognize the employee's mistakes or the potential of other employees.

Contrast effect

This is the perceived reality influenced by something one is unsure about because of limited information. Still, they perceive it as accurate because it positively impacts their life. For instance, they are listening to someone who loses something valuable that they might be possessing and might even influence them to lose it.