Social attention in realistic work environments

• Main Author: MASTERS-WAAGE, Theodore Charles
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Institutional Knowledge at Singapore Management University 2022
• Subjects: Social Attention; Virtual Reality; Decision Making; Judgement Formation; and Attentional Bias; Organizational Behavior and Theory
• Online Access: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/etd_coll/440; https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/context/etd_coll/article/1440/viewcontent/Social_Attention_in_Realistic_Work_Environments.pdf
• Institution: Singapore Management University

Social attention – the process by which individuals select which aspect of the social world to mentally process – is a key antecedent to all organisational behaviour in groups. This central role of attention has long been appreciated by organisational theorists, but our understanding of this core cognitive process has been hampered by a lack of empirical evidence. To create a method through which organisational scholars can study social attention, this dissertation combines cognitive science measures of attention with recent innovations from social and applied psychology using virtual reality to study naturalistic social behaviour (Chapter 1). This method is then applied to investigate the factors that determine whether individuals can capture the attention of their audience at work – e.g., charismatic job candidates receiving more attention than non-charismatic job candidates – and the downstream effects this has on individual-level outcomes (Chapter 2). These biases in social attention are then incorporated into models of group decision-making to demonstrate how micro-level attentional biases in group decision-making scenarios can translate into macro-level decision biases and thus sub-optimal decision outcomes (Chapter 3). The dissertation concludes with an inductive theory of “Socially Bounded Rationality” that hopes to spur future research on this topic.