Hu ans are surrounded by trillions of stimuli. Their eyes, for instance, can discriminate 7,500,000 colors. But, there is a severe limitation in the number of discriminably different stimuli that they can process at one time. George Miller argued that they can handle no more than seven, plus or minus two independent pieces of information at any given time. Thus, necessarily they must develop ways to simplify the task of processing the information that exists in their environment. They do this in many ways. One way is to select the stimuli that are most imp- tant in their lives, what are often called values. Another way is to chunk stimuli by linking them to each other, so they form bundles of stimuli that can be processed as if they are one entity. Generalized expectancies of what is linked with what are beliefs, and these beliefs are structured into bundles (see Triandis, 1972).
Kwok Leung is professor and Head of Management at City University of Hong Kong. He received his doctorate in social and organizational psychology at the University of Illinois. He is Deputy Editor-in-Chief ofJournal of International Business Studies and senior editor ofManagement and Organization Review. His research areas include justice and conflict, cross-cultural psychology and research methods, and international business. Michae Harris Bond is Professor of Psychology at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. He graduated from Stanford University, where he began his study of person perception, subsequently broadened to include research into the areas of justice, aggression, and impression management. |
