Jared discovered that one of his colleagues received negative feedback during his performance review. As he had gone through a s
imilar experience, he believed that he got the negative feedback because the management was unfair in setting unrealistic productivity goals. However, the truth was that although the quality of his work was good, he often struggled to meet his productivity targets. In this scenario, Jared's belief represents a(n) _____.
Defensive bias is a form of defense mechanism that people do when they are feeling a threat. Rather than acknowledging the threat, people with defensive choose to minimize the fear from the threat by attributing the cause of the threat to something that is outside of their control.
We can see this in Jared's situation.
When he received a negative review, he felt threaten that he might lost his job since he fail to met a certain standard.
To cope with the fear from the threat, he attribute it to other things and blame the management for giving 'unrealistic goals' rather than improving his productivity.
