Question

For this assignment, I would like you to review the five perceptual errors listed below.

• Oversimplifying: Tendency to prefer simplicity over complexity because it is less effort
• Imposing consistency: Tendency to impose patterns where they don’t exist
• Focusing on the negative: Tendency to perceive negative characteristics as more important than positive
• Making a fundamental attribution error: Tendency to assume that others’ failures are their own fault, but that success is due to situational factors
• Exhibiting a self-serving bias: Tendency to assume that our own failures are due to situational factors, but our success is due to our personal qualities

Following your review, you need to identify/describe an incident/circumstance that has taken place in your life that matches each of those perceptual errors. Your submission for this assignment must be no less than 100 words for each of the perceptual errors listed, therefore the entire paper should be at least 500 words in length.

Answer 1

Solution –

Let us delve into each characteristic error in detail with the help of an instance as example –

1. Oversimplification – There was in instance when after a client meeting on a software delivery the team tried to drill down too much on the requirements and started providing solutions such as changes in the wireframe which were easier to put in place but might affect the objective of the software. The simplification of the requirements led to a deliverable that was actually declined by the client on the basis of bad requirement gathering which led to a lot of embarrassment on our side.
2. Imposing Consistency – This happens many times when we enter into a data science project. One such project was to identify patterns of failed transactions for an online store. Here the data was somewhere around 50,000 failed transaction and simple decision tree models were set on the data to identify any patterns. The problem was that there was overfitting on the data and the data analysts did not go in for asking for more fresh data set for validation and ultimately led to wrong conclusions and diverted the attention of the management till another team of data analysts realized the mistake and acquired fresh data to re – configure the data model.
3. Focusing on Negative – This is an instance after a client meeting where formulation of the offering was being done and certain people were asked to play the devil’s advocate to ensure that all loose ends are covered. What materialized was that all the people delving on the negative aspects of the solution kept on pointing only negatives on each suggested solution that even the presenters became too cautious in presenting their solutions and some even dropped the presentation as they felt that the meeting was going on a different tangent. It was overcome by some enforcements from the management team as team members were hesitating to come up with solutions.
4. Making fundamental attribution error – This instance is a practice by a manager who blamed his team head – on for any faults and misses in the targets and all successes were just taken as circumstantial and also referred to as a result of upswing in the economy. This led to low motivation in the team and higher attrition rate. This affected the productivity and finally the manager was sacked and a newer positive manager was brought in to resurrect the team.
5. Self – Serving Bias – This was an instance from the team members who exhibited a way of assigning all their faults to others or situations. This led to no proper mechanism for improvement and what resulted was catastrophic as the performance continued to decline the team members had lost the knack of critical review and hence they all had become defensive towards self-review and were unable to accept changes readily. The only way to bring the team out of this situation was to have one to one counselling so as to bring a feeling of positivity in the team and encourage people to adapt with their mistakes and improve.