Are Stereotyping, Halo Effect, And Attribution Errors?

How do we decide what another person is like? Since this is a question of how we attribute personality traits, motives and abilities to other people, the theories around how we do this are known as attribution theory. As human beings we naturally try to sum people up and often due to this give ourselves the wrong picture of somebody. In this essay I am going to try to explain three of these sources of error, stereotyping, halo effect and attribution errors.

Errors in social perception are a common occurrence, one of these errors is known as the halo effect. We all have a number of general assumptions about what personality traits go together. The likelihood is that we like to see positive characteristics going along with other positive ones,
The halo effect refers to the tendency to rate a person's skills and talents in many areas based upon an evaluation of a single factor. The perceiver's general impression of a target distorts his or her perception of the target on specific dimensions. For example, an employee who has made a good overall impression on a supervisor is rated as performing high-quality work and always meeting deadlines even when work is flawed. This can also vary depending on the supervisor, as what impresses one supervisor may carry very little weight with another supervisor, hence the employee may receive different appraisal ratings depending on the supervisor. A possible way to solve this problem may be to have more than one supervisor to rate an employee's work, thus giving two opinions of the
This will be more often than not negative stereotyping as each group or department want to prove that they are better than another hence reducing the likelihood of cooperation and togetherness within a company. Combating stereotyping in many organisations is now a big thing for management as they try to improve their business. An example of this can be found in some banks, as in many banks years ago the bank manager would not have to wear a uniform in conjunction with the other members of staff, which may have caused the staff to resent the management as it may lead to the staff believing that the management think of themselves as better than the other staff, this policy has now changed within many banks with managers now wearing the same uniform as the other staff and hence reducing the negative