Week 10 Flashcards
Impression management
Participants who self-affirm are more objective and less likely to sink into denial when interpreting threatening health information.
Women concerned about losing weight were recruited into a self-affirmation study. Those who self-affirmed had lower body mass index at the end of the study than those who did not self-affirm.
African American and Latino American students who completed a values essay 7-8 times over a 2-year period received higher grade point averages (this did not occur for White students).
Self comparing
When asked to compare ourselves against “typical people” or the “average other”, we report very positive self-views.
93% of drivers think they’re better than average
Only 1% of people rate their marriage as worse than most
Jailed criminals think they are kinder, more trustworthy, and honest than the general public!
It feels good (accurate self-appraisers are also more likely to be depressed)
Believing our enhanced self enables us to better convince others of our awesomeness
Self-handicapping
Self-handicapping is a strategy by which people invite obstacles in the hopes of keeping potential failure from hurting their self-esteem.
Self-handicapping can be self-claimed (e.g., claiming poor health) … or it can be achieved through behaviour:
Withdrawing effort
Alcohol consumption
Procrastination
Refusing to practice
Choosing unobtainable goals
Self-handicapping has been examined using a range of methods: interviews, self-report scales, and “catching” self-handicapping in the lab.
Self-handicapping is most common:
Among boys
Among low achievers
Among those who are motivated by extrinsic goals
Among people with entity beliefs about achievement.
Slow to suspect
We’re slow to suspect (“impostor blindness”)
Why? Partly because people are influenced by superficial characteristics; partly because big lies are sometimes more plausible than little ones (he wouldn’t lie about that, surely).
-it does not occur us to ask whether the masked figure poised with a knife over our unconscious naked body is really a doctor
Attracting others
Unlike many other animals, humans don’t have obvious physical signs that they’re at a fertile part of their cycle.
But changes do occur, much of it beyond conscious awareness … for roughly six days mid-cycle women dress more provocatively, flirt more (with high-quality partners only), and show tiny shifts in voice pitch, scent and skin tone.
Men may notice these changes (unconsciously). Jon Maner shows that men inched closer to a woman — and mimicked her gestures more — when she was ovulating. Richard Ronay (a former PhD student at UQ) got skateboarders to do tricks in front of either a beautiful female research assistant or a male assistant.
In front of the beautiful woman they took more risks, leading to both more successful tricks and more crash landing and aborted tricks. The effect was partly mediated by increases in testosterone
Attracting others- Griskevicius et al. (2006)
Griskevicius et al. (2009) gave participants a “dating prime” or did not. Women who were given the dating prime conformed more … men who were given the dating prime conformed less.
Subsequent research suggests that these instincts might be flawed (Hornsey et al., 2015).
Griskevicius et al. (2006) found that both men and women who were given a dating prime produced more creative stories, paintings and cartoons than those who had not … even when they couldn’t benefit from that performance in the immediate context.
For women the effect only emerged if they were asked to think about attracting a high-quality, long-term mate.
Another Griskevicius study … For men, inducing mating goals increased willingness to spend on conspicuous luxuries, but not on basic necessities. For women, mating goals boosted public—but not private—helping. Although mating motivation did not generally inspire helping in men, it did induce more helpfulness in contexts allowing men to display heroism or dominance.
Attracting others- Rosenberg & Tunney (2008)
Rosenberg & Tunney (2008) showed that men used more low-frequency words after an imaginary encounter with a young woman … whereas women use more high-frequency words (Dumbing down? Getting along?)
Ingratiation
Can you get ahead in life by “sucking up”?
People senior to you are probably not going to see you as sucking up … they tend to take praise on its merits.
But people on your level and below you probably will see it as sucking up, and this can backfire.
SLIME EFFECT
people who are seen to be “sucking up” at the same time as “kicking down” are rated very negatively
Self-deprecation
Leaders’ use of self-deprecating humour (or even group-deprecating humour) is positively associated with ratings of transformational leadership as they minimize power distinctions (whereas leaders’ use of aggressive humor makes things worse).
BUT … works better for high power people (both in terms of winning support from work colleagues and in terms of men attracting women).
Self-deprecation can also backfire if it’s seen as inauthentic
Thin slices
Participants are exposed to 30 second soundless clips of doctors interacting with patients. These participants’ ratings of the doctor’s “niceness” predict the likelihood of that doctor getting sued. Ratings of a teacher based on a short (6-30 second) soundless clip of a teacher interacting with a class significantly predicts evaluations of that teacher at the end of semester by students and principals.
Communicating competence
“Be true to yourself” “Stand out – be different” “Don’t let anyone tell you what to do” “Do what feels right for you” “March to the beat of your own drum” “Follow your heart” “You have the right to be treated as an individual” “Don’t edit yourself”
Facebook is depressing
Kross et al. (2013) sent text messages to participants five times per day. The more people used Facebook in the time between the two texts, the less happy they felt—and the more their overall satisfaction declined from the beginning of the study until its end.
Masking ourselves
“It’s in these roles that we know each other; it’s in these roles that we know ourselves …
In a sense, this mask is our truer self, the self we would like to be. In the end our conception of our role becomes second nature and an integral part of our personality.”
Feeling like an impostor
Correlational studies have shown that the feeling of being an impostor is related to:
Self-reported depression Anxiety Low self-esteem Self-consciousness Fear of success Feeling like an impostor can also occur when people attribute positive qualities to you that you don’t feel you can live up to:
“I actually was crumbling under that so-called banner of ‘strength in the face of adversity’. People just thought that I had this fighting spirit in me, and I never felt that…that I did. So, I felt like an impostor, really.”
Victoria Friend
