Psychology Situations Essay, Research Paper

A) A company hired you to be the new manager of a division that has not been doing well for several months. How can you improve employee performance?

I would improve the employee performance by positive reinforcement. Lets just say that the company division is supposed to make phones. Once the phones got out into the market, there were a lot of complaints and recalls on them. I would talk to my employees and give them rewards if they put more time into the products that they make. After a month if I didn?t hear any more complaints, then I?d start giving out rewards to the employees; by maybe letting them leave an hour early, or buying pizza for the whole crew. Anything that would keep the customers satisfied, and makes me look good as a manager. Positive reinforcement seems to be the smartest way to proceed with this problem. Because once the customers and employees are happy, then my job is done. The goal is to do the least amount of work to please everyone. (Psychologists aren?t the only one?s that are lazy bastards!) But by any chance if the employees were still putting out bad phones, and if we were still hearing complaints, then I?d put punishment into order. I?d punish them by firing a few of the workers, to show everyone else, that I?m not playing around, and that I want good phones to come out of them.

C) Upon reaching the finals of a tennis tournament, you discover that your opponent is someone that has beaten you every one of the six times you?ve been matched before. What can you do to alter the outcome this time around?

Personally I?d find some discriminating information about my opponent and bribe them with it, but unfortunately that isn?t an option here. I?ve come up with a few conclusions here. The first thing is, you don?t do anything. All you do is go out there and play your heart out. It doesn?t really matter if my opponent has beaten me six times. Because I remember this story that you were telling us about this guy who wanted to get the sperm of this genius who received many awards, and the genius told him to get his fathers sperm; because his children were bums. So hearing that you kind of wonder, does statistics really mean much? I would have a just as good of a chance of beating my opponent than he/she would have of beating me.

My other conclusion is memory. Capacity and storage. I would study my opponent and how I played this person in my earlier defeats. Then I would memorize how this person had beaten me on certain plays. Then I would study them, so I wouldn?t make the same mistakes in my next game. I would fit 5 to 9 pieces of information into my brain (capacity), and remember them when I?m facing my opponent. And I would store information in my brain. For example, if I noticed that every time my opponent got an ace on me from serving, he/she would rub his/her eyebrow, and then serve it to the far right of me. I would store eyebrow-right in my brain, so that way every time I see he/she rubbing his/her eyebrow, I?d lean towards the right a little.

D) You are a salesperson getting ready to exhibit your products or services at a large trade show where you will be in a booth surrounded by many other booths staffed by other salespeople displaying products or services very similar to yours. What can you do to make sure your products or services will be noticed and remembered by the people passing by?

I would make sure that my products or services would be noticed and remembered by people by subliminal messaging. Like the theatre scene where someone would put a picture of a hot dog in the middle. I would somehow engrave the name of my booth into the customers? heads. By maybe putting up one of those magic eye posters, where if you stare into the dots for a minute, you?ll see the name of my booth pop up, or you?ll see my products and services pop up. This way people will run up to my booth and check out my products, and they will remember my products because of the subliminal message.

Or another way to get customers to come to my booth would be positive reinforcement. I could easily hand out lollypops, or slices of pizza, or cans of pop to everybody that checks out my booth. This way I would have a lot of people by my area, I can guarantee that they wouldn?t forget my products of services.