Running from the shadow: psychological distancing from others to deny characteristics people fear in themselves

Four experiments tested the hypothesis that people distance themselves from others who display characteristics they fear in themselves. In Study 1, participants were given false feedback that they were high or low in repressed anger and were given information about a person who became angry and responded in a violent or nonviolent manner. High anger feedback participants distanced themselves only from the violent person. In Study 2, high anger feedback led to distancing from a violent other but not a dishonest other, whereas dishonesty feedback led to distancing from a dishonest other but not a violent other. The results of Studies 3 and 4 replicated and extended the distancing effect with an anger induction: Participants who were insulted distanced themselves from an angry/violent person, and verbalizing their emotions about being insulted eliminated this effect. Implications for understanding defenses against undesirable self-attributions are discussed.     

The diversity paradox: when people who value diversity surround themselves with like‐minded others

An anomaly exists between society's push for diversity and people's preference to be with like‐minded others—a diversity paradox. Research suggests it is endemic to group life to accentuate similarity within groups and maximize differences between groups. Drawing on uncertainty–identity theory, that uncertainty motivates identification with clearly defined groups, we explore whether increasing community identification to alleviate self‐uncertainty is impacted when diversity is important. In a naturalistic experiment, values match and placing importance on diversity each predicted community identification. Uncertainty decreased identification when diversity was important. Greater identification emerged when diversity and value similarity were important. This effect, strong under low uncertainty, did not emerge under high uncertainty. Findings are discussed in terms of the antagonism between society's push for diversity and research on the psychology of groups.     

I see how you feel: How the dark triad recognizes emotions

Current Psychology - The present study (N = 212; 150 females) examined the relationships between the Dark Triad, empathy, and emotion recognition in a cross-cultural sample. The Dark...     

Automatic for the people: how representations of significant others implicitly affect goal pursuit

Five studies are presented that explore how representations of significant others may automatically affect goal pursuit. Specifically, evidence is presented that suggests goals may be primed by one's representation of a significant other and that this priming may be moderated by one's closeness to this other individual. It is also shown to be affected by the number of different goals associated with this person. The greater the number of goals associated with a significant other, the less likely this individual will invoke any 1 goal very strongly. Such goal priming is shown to have implications for the extent to which goals are pursued (as seen through task persistence and performance) as well as the extent to which they are inhibited or ignored (especially when an individual is associated with a goal unrelated to a current pursuit).     

Seeing close others as we see ourselves: One’s own self-complexity is reflected in perceptions of meaningful others

Although past research has established a correspondence between the content of knowledge about the self and close others, the current work evaluated the prediction that the self-concept also influences the structure of these perceptions. Specifically, we expected greater correspondence in the complexity of mental representations between the self and others included in the self. In Study 1, we found that self-complexity was related to the perceived complexity of a close other and that this outcome did not reflect a general tendency to perceive the world in a systematically complex or simple fashion (i.e., cognitive complexity). In Study 2, we found that the correspondence between self-complexity and complexity of representations of others increased for individuals more included in the self. Finally in Study 3, we observed that experimentally manipulating inclusion of other in the self resulted in perceived structural similarity between representations of the self and others. Implications of self-concept representation for social relationships are discussed.     

How I see me depends on how I see we: the role of attachment style in social comparison

The self-concept is a social, flexible construct that shifts in response to the salience of a relationship partner. Three related experiments found that the tendency to pursue closeness in relationships (as measured by attachment style) served as a moderator of the shift. Specifically, individuals who avoid closeness in relationships became less similar to salient friends via contrast effects, whereas those who pursued closeness in relationships became more similar to salient friends via assimilation effects. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for the nature of the self-concept and the importance of friendships.     

When what you have is who you are: self-uncertainty leads individualists to see themselves in their possessions

Four studies tested whether uncertainty about the self-concept can motivate people, particularly individualists who define themselves in terms of their personal traits and characteristics, to perceive their material possessions as extensions of themselves (i.e., as self-expressive). In Study 1, European American participants rated their favorite pair of blue jeans as more self-expressive after being induced to feel self-uncertain, whereas Asian American participants did not. In Study 2, participants who scored high on a measure of individualism rated their cars as more self-expressive following a self-uncertainty manipulation. In Study 3, individualists (but not collectivists) rated their favorite possessions as more self-expressive after being subject to self-uncertainty; a manipulation of self-irrelevant uncertainty did not produce these results. In Study 4, thinking about a self-expressive (relative to utilitarian) possession bolstered self-certainty among individualists, but not collectivists. Implications for research on culture, the self-concept, and possessions are discussed.     

Knowing too much: using private knowledge to predict how one is viewed by others

People have more information about themselves than others do, and this fundamental asymmetry can help to explain why individuals have difficulty accurately intuiting how they appear to other people. Determining how one appears to observers requires one to utilize public information that is available to observers, but to disregard private information that they do not possess. We report a series of experiments, however, showing that people utilize privately known information about their own past performance (Experiments 1 and 2), the performance of other people (Experiment 3), and imaginary performance (Experiment 4) when intuiting how they are viewed by others. This tendency can help explain why people's beliefs about how they are judged by others often diverge from how they are actually judged.     

Attributional inference across cultures: similar automatic attributions and different controlled corrections

Five studies examined the automatic and controlled components of attributional inference in U.S. and East Asian (EA) samples. Studies 1 through 3 used variations of the "anxious woman" paradigm, manipulating the inferential goal (dispositional or situational) and the normative impact of situational constraint information (discounting or augmenting). In each study, U.S. and EA participants under cognitive load produced strong automatic attributions to the focus of their inferential goal (dispositional or situational). Compared with the U.S. cognitive load participants, U.S. no load participants corrected their attributions according to the normative rules of inference. In contrast, EA no load participants corrected in the direction of situational causality, even when the specific content of the situational information provided should have promoted stronger dispositional inferences. Studies 4 and 5 examined and ruled out alternative accounts. Results are discussed in terms of a situational causality heuristic present in EA individuals.     

How speakers interrupt themselves in managing problems in speaking: evidence from self-repairs

When speakers detect a problem in what they are saying, they must decide whether or not to interrupt themselves and repair the problem, and if so, when. Speakers will maximize accuracy if they interrupt themselves as soon as they detect a problem, but they will maximize fluency if they go on speaking until they are ready to produce the repair. Speakers must choose between these options. In a corpus analysis, we identified 448 speech repairs, classified them as major (as in a fresh start) or minor (as in a phoneme correction), and measured the interval between suspension and repair. The results showed that speakers interrupted themselves not at the moment they detected the problem but at the moment they were ready to produce the repair. Speakers preferred fluency over accuracy.     

How people make support judgments: individual differences in the traits used to infer supportiveness in others.

Social support and other social judgments are composed of several distinct components, of which relationship effects are an important part. With regard to support judgments, relationship effects refer to the fact that when judging the same targets, people differ systematically in whom they see as supportive. One explanation for this effect is that people differ in how they combine information about targets to judge supportiveness. Participants rated the supportiveness of hypothetical targets and targets from their own social networks. Multilevel modeling identified the traits participants used to make support judgments. There were significant differences in the extent to which participants used different target personality traits to judge supportiveness. In addition, participant neuroticism predicted the extent to which participants used target neuroticism and agreeableness to judge supportiveness.     

Bounded by Disbelief: How Atheists in the United States Differentiate themselves from Religious Believers

Recent empirical studies have revealed that religious believers tend to hold atheists and other religious doubters in low regard. This article examines how atheists in turn negotiate and construct the social and symbolic boundaries between atheists and religious believers. I draw on ethnographic and interview data to explore the lenses through which atheists view religion, religious believers, and the boundary between religious believers and non-believers. I find that atheists participate in boundary work to construct difference between religious believers and non-believers. However, atheists see greater social distance between themselves and some groups of religious believers than they do in relation to other groups, constructing religious leaders and devout adherents of particular religions as especially different. Atheists’ constructions of religious believers also vary in response to their individual experiences with religious people. The analysis illuminates the complexity of boundary work among members of a minority group.     

The dynamics of daily events and well-being across cultures: when less is more

The authors examined cultural and individual differences in the relation between daily events and daily satisfaction. In a preliminary study, they established cross-cultural equivalence of 50 daily events. In the main study, participants in the United States, Korea, and Japan completed daily surveys on the 50 events and daily satisfaction for 21 days. The multilevel random coefficient model analyses showed that (a) the within-person association between positive events and daily satisfaction was significantly stronger among Asian American, Korean, and Japanese participants than among European American participants and (b) the within-person association between positive events and daily satisfaction was significantly weaker among individuals high in global life satisfaction than among those low in global life satisfaction. The findings demonstrate a weaker effect of positive events on daily well-being among individuals and cultures high in global well-being.     

Diversity in context: how organizational culture shapes reactions to workers with disabilities and others who are demographically different

Successfully integrating workers with disabilities into their organizations is both a challenge and an opportunity facing managers today. Despite laws and business practices prohibiting discrimination against those with disabilities, people with disabilities are consistently underutilized in organizations. This article applies theories of demographic diversity in organizations to assert that a richer understanding of organizational cultures and their implications for workers with disabilities may shed light on the question of how and why workers with disabilities may be excluded from mainstream work experiences and career progression. The article briefly reviews business arguments that support integration of workers with disabilities into organizations based on their contribution to the overall diversity within the organization, and reviews complications in the research on diversity to date that leave important questions of the potential gains or detriments from increasing this diversity unanswered. The article then goes on to introduce organizational culture as an underinvestigated but likely potent tool in explaining how and when workers who are demographically different, in general, and with disabilities, specifically, may be successfully integrated into an organization's work force. The article introduces three types of organizational culture: culture of differentiation, culture of unity, and culture of integration. Each is explained in terms of its content and its implications for managing diversity. A discussion of the implications of culture as a primary tool for managing the integration of workers with disabilities concludes the paper.     

Putting mood in context: Using smartphones to examine how people feel in different locations

Does personality predict how people feel in different types of situations? The present research addressed this question using data from several thousand individuals who used a mood tracking smartphone application for several weeks. Results from our analyses indicated that people’s momentary affect was linked to their location, and provided preliminary evidence that the relationship between state affect and location might be moderated by personality. The results highlight the importance of looking at person-situation relationships at both the trait- and state-levels and also demonstrate how smartphones can be used to collect person and situation information as people go about their everyday lives.