Selective Perception and Projection - who do they affect social perception

In the last blog, we listed the various barriers that could arise in social perception. In today's blog we discuss a few of these for better understanding.

In organizations, when you are a manager you would sometimes finds a situations where a reporting employee is not really getting along with his/her colleagues well, but the output of the employee is exceptionally good. When we evaluate the performance of the employee; many a times, we ignore the negative information regarding the employee and only choose to evaluate based on the impact of the work created. This tendency to ignore information that makes us feel uncomfortable, while only considering aspects that support our view is called Selective Perception.

We have heard the common saying - "Birds of the same feather flock together". It is surprising how much of information this saying could give us when it comes to Projections. It is our common nature to be with people who are alike, but this could create a bias in our minds which would let us o believe that all people are alike and in agreement with us. When interact with the people who do not have believe in similar things as we do, we tend to have misperceptions about these people. This nature of ours to overestimate the number of people who share our beliefs, values and behavior is called Projection, i.e. we project our personality on the people around us.