Halo And Prophecy Management

Early rejection has been the rule for many people rather than the exception. People who have the same skill set can perform well or badly. Our expectations can influence the impressions we make on others. Those who expect to be accepted and perceive others as friendly are often accepted and popular. The same principle applies with people displaying the opposite factors. A person's psychological set, their expectations or predisposition, helps to confirm a self-fulfilling prophecy (Tubbs and Moss, 1994).

We also tend to expect certain behaviours to go together. How we select and organize information about people creates a private theory of personality often on the basis of very limited information. Filtering and selection of information creates our own personal constructs in comprehending and exploring people and events (Fincham and Rhodes, 1999).

First impressions are very important. Our perception of people can be made on the single impression of an unfavourable or undesirable trait and may be taken to mean that the person has other undesirable traits, shutting out other relevant information (Mullins, 1999). If we aren't careful a bad impression can be vary hard to change. The halo/horns effects are as undesirable as primacy and recency effects. The importance of first impressions and our tendencies to make false assumptions and predictions about behaviour are such that the distortion can lead to the Peter Principle in promotion situations (Kakabadse, Ludlow and Vinnicombe, 1987). Treating people according to first impressions and what you want them to become can create self-fulfilling prophecies. The problem is the positive kind are not as infallible as the negative kind.

The 'target person' can of course respond. We can use tactics to present a certain image of ourselves to the outside world (Arnold, Cooper and Anderson, 1998). Impression management, as it is called, can take place on four fronts: superior, subordinate, specialist and lower participants. Understanding a social situation helps us to perform well in it. Social activity is dynamic and creative and statistics cannot make much of it. We may be unaware of the considerable cognitive achievement automatic social responses represent. Personality from this perspective of impression management is seen as form of social intelligence. Persona describes the social face. Personal fronts are continually monitored in self-presentational activity by making comparisons between the given and the given off. 360 feedback is useful for those with less well marked self-monitoring. Self-awareness differentiates high and low performing individuals. Appearance and manner are also symbolic. We tend to accept another self-definition. Breaking that rule can lead to serious disruption of social interaction and damage another person's integrity (Fincham and Rhodes, 1999).

We cannot be all things to all people. Our perceptions of what other people think of us are a result of self-perception as much as anything else. People may be more influenced by what we say about ourselves than what anyone else might say about us. The credibility and motives of the others may be responsible for it but the potentially most biased source of information may be the most credible. It is therefore necessary to be able to discern accurately the behaviour of the target (Arnold, Cooper and Anderson, 1998).