Psychology Processes in Business Communication
Summary Articles
, Understanding Misunderstanding: Social Psychological Perspectives
Pronin, Puccio & Ross (2002)
Biases may contribute to conflict in different ways:
• When different people are subject to the influence of different biases, they are bound to
think and feel differently about issues
• People who disagree about matters of mutual concern not only interact in conflictual ways:
they also interpret, and frequently misinterpret, each other’s words and deeds
Form Intrapersonal Biases to Interpersonal Conflict:
Attention, Perception, and Assimilation Biases:
People go beyond the information given by perceiving things as they have been led by experience or
suggestion to expect them to be, and their perceptions are further biased by their hopes, fears,
needs, and immediate emotional state.
Investigators argued that recipients of persuasive arguments often prove to be rationalizing rather
than rational animals, and as such are influenced less by logical rigor or objective evidence than by
the interests and preconceptions that they bring to their task.
Polarization: the tendency to accept arguments and evidence congruent with one’s interests and
beliefs, while critically examine arguments and evidence that contradict their interests and beliefs.
Intergroup enmity can also arise from simple availability and representative biases:
• Social ills like poverty, unemployment, or discrimination are bound to be influence by
availability biases reflecting where one lives, whom one talks to and what one reads
• Media-based notions of what a ‘representative’ person (e.g., Feminist, Lesbian) look and act
like influences expectations, helping determine which claims are credible or noncredible
Dissonance Reduction and Reactance:
Rational judgement and dispute resolution that are created by prior commitment, personal sacrifice,
and perseverance in the face of earlier temptations, abandon a cause: War veterans have to
continue to (dis)agree about events or associated war things, or pay a heavy psychic price.
Practitioners of dissonance reduction and rationalization:
• Are apt to make unwarranted inferences about each other’s objectivity and honesty in
facing the past and drawing lessons for the future
• Feel wronged and misunderstood by the rest who seem content to ‘move on’
People readily recognize biases in others that they do not recognize in themselves, as a result, they
make negative attributions about others whose views and self-interested motives seem
‘conveniently’ congruent.
Reactive devaluation: potential compromise offers or concessions become less attractive to the
recipient as a consequence of the fact that they have been offered by another party.
Purported authorship matters more than the actual authorship and content of a proposal. When
purported authorships are reversed, the other side’s proposal is preferred as one’s own.
Status of proposals to end a conflict might also be important. A proposed concession that seems
relatively attractive before it has been offered became significantly less attractive once put on the
table. The party receiving the proposal complains that the proposed terms offer too little or too late.
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,Lessons from Prospect Theory:
Prospect theory is relevant to interpersonal and intergroup negotiation. It argues that changes in the
status quo that represent a prospective gain to one side may represent a prospective loss to the
other side. People should be reluctant to make agreements and accept losses to achieve gains.
Longstanding adversaries remain deadlocked in a ‘hurting stalemate’: unwilling to risk a change in
the status quo that seemingly would be mutually beneficial. People forfeit potential joint gains that
could result from real peace and a truly cooperative relationship.
Prospect theory axioms and utility functions can be applied to consequential decisions made by
individuals engaged in conflict:
Writers contention:
• Reluctance to trade concessions, coupled with a willingness to take foolish risks to avoid
certain losses and refusal to take sensible risk in order to achieve prospective gains, operates
in the courtroom and labor negotiations, trade disputes, and self-determination conflicts.
• The adversaries in questions are inclined to defend their own ‘prudence’ even while making
harsh attributions about their adversaries ‘intransigence’.
Biases in Attribution Made about Self and Others:
Two attributional biases directly affect interpersonal misunderstanding and enmity:
• People’s tendency to underestimate the impact of situational or contextual factors on overt
actions, resulting in making overly broad and overly ‘dispositional’ attributes about others
• People’s tendency to give greater weight to situational factors in assessing their own actions
and outcomes than those of their peers
These biases leave the ‘losers’ (i.e., homeless, stigmatized minorities) feel doubly victimized. Not
only by the objective privations of their situations, but also by assessments and suggested remedies
offered by their victimizer and others who ‘do not understand the situation’.
‘Better-than-average’ effect argues that people believe that their abilities, performances, or
attribute exceed those of others, which enhances an individual’s self-efficacy, self-fulfilling
prophesies, and mental and physical health.
Yet, people might feel overworked, underappreciated, and undercompensated, which might feel
they have been denied outcomes commensurate with their entitlements and further denied the
gratitude and recognition they deserve for their past forbearance.
Naïve Realism: Biased Perceptions and Perceptions of Bias:
Other people who see the world differently, in consequence of some basic intellectual and moral
defect, are unable to see things ‘as they really are’ and to react to them ‘in a normal way’ (our way).
By interpreting and predicting the behavior of their peers, people may be inclined to overestimate
the impact of many of the shortcomings and biases that we reviewed
Egocentrism and Other Failures in Perspective Taking:
People of normal intelligence not only learn to recognize the existence of differences in perspective,
they even gain skill at anticipating specific sources of perceptual, cognitive, or motivational bias.
The False Consensus Effect:
The false consensus effect refers to people’s tendency who make a given choice or hold a given
conviction to see that response as more common and less revealing of personal attributes than
people do who make the opposite response.
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, Construal refers to individuals' perception and action in seeking to comprehend, categorize, identify
and/or recognize what they encounter in the form of tasks, suggestions or other kind of experience.
‘Childish’ Games:
It is difficult to appreciate the perspective of someone who is facing a task or problem when that
information is familiar or meaningful to us, but not to the other individual (Queen example).
Once one knows the message being conveyed by the clue giver, the message appears obvious and
one losses the ability to appreciate the perspective of someone who does not know it.
In initiating break-ups, participants were frustrated by their ex-partner’s inability or willingness to
understand the message, but resentful of their partner’s failure in wording when they were the one
receiving the message.
Tenets of Naïve Realism:
Naïve realism: people persist in feeling that their own take on the world enjoys particular
authenticity, and that other actors will, or at least should, share that take if they are attentive,
rational, and objective perceivers of reality and open-minded seekers of truth.
Epistemological stance following three specific propositions:
• I see stimuli, issues and events as they are in objective reality, and my social attitudes,
beliefs, preferences, priorities, and the like follow from relatively dispassionate (indeed,
unmediated) apprehension of the information or evidence at hand
• Other rational social perceivers generally share my judgements and reactions – provided
that they have had access to the same information that gave rise to my views, and provided
that they too have processed that information in a reasonably thoughtful and open-minded
fashion
• The failure of a given individual/ group to share my judgements and reactions arises from
three possible sources:
o People may have been exposed to a different sample of information than I was
o People may be lazy, irrational or otherwise unable or unwilling to proceed in a
normative fashion from objective evidence to reasonable conclusions
o People may be biased by ideology, self-interest, or some other distorting influence
Overconfidence about Ability to Persuade Others:
People are overconfident that ‘real’ things are the way ‘we see them’.
Optimism that rational, open-minded dialog, in which information is freely exchanged, will lead to
agreements or acceptable disagreement is short-lived. Repeated attempts at dialog with those on
the other side make it clear they rarely yield to our attempt to enlighten them, and that they rarely
present new facts and arguments that persuade us to change our minds.
The Hostile Media/Mediator Effect:
Cognitive biases lead people to see and remember a reality that is consistent with their beliefs and
expectations. Motivational biases cause people to see what is consistent with their needs, wishes,
and self-interest.
‘Hostile media effect’ is a perceptual theory of mass communication that refers to the tendency for
individuals with a strong preexisting attitude on an issue to perceive media coverage as biased
against their side and in favor of their antagonists' point of view.
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