When modesty fails: The social impact of group-effacing attributions following success or failure

This study explored how group members perceived a fellow group member who made either group-serving or group-effacing attributions following success or failure. Forty male undergraduates from the Chinese University co-operated in pairs with a confederate on a demanding group task. After learning that their group's performance had exceeded or failed to meet a standard, the subjects heard their confederate-partner make group-effacing or group-serving attributions. As predicted, subjects evaluated the group-serving partners more highly (p < 0.05). Preference for group-enhancing members was discussed as a pancultural response arising from the interdependence of group members. Given the process of social categorization, group members rise or fall together and are therefore socialized to support their group.     

Effects of alcohol on the storage and retrieval processes of heavy social drinkers

Two experiments investigated the effects of intoxication, expectation of intoxication, and state dependency on learning and relearning in male heavy social drinkers. In both studies, subjects participated in two daily sessions. On Day 1, intoxicated and sober subjects were presented with word lists for immediate free recall, followed by total free recall of all words. On Day 2, with or without a change in drug state, subjects were given a second total recall test, the same lists for immediate recall, and a third total recall test. In Experiment 1, 10 subjects served in each of four groups formed by crossing expectation with reception of alcohol on Day 1; all subjects were sober on Day 2. In Experiment 2, 12 subjects served in each of four groups formed by crossing drug state on Day 1 with drug state on Day 2 (sober-sober, sober-intoxicated, intoxicated-intoxicated, intoxicated-sober), and all expected alcohol. In both studies, intoxication produced a performance deficit, but retention loss on Day 2 was the same for change- and constant-state subjects. Expectation had no effect on performance. Results are discussed in terms of an alcohol-induced storage deficiency rather than a retrieval deficit.     

Implicit and explicit alcohol-related cognitions in heavy and light drinkers

Implicit and explicit alcohol-related cognitions were measured in 2 dimensions: positive-negative (valence) and arousal-sedation, with 2 versions of the Implicit Association Test (IAT; A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, & J. L. Schwartz) and related explicit measures. Heavy drinkers (n = 24) strongly associated alcohol with arousal on the arousal IAT (especially men) and scored higher on explicit arousal expectancies than light drinkers (n = 24). On the valence IAT, both light and heavy drinkers showed strong negative implicit associations with alcohol that contrasted with their positive explicit judgments (heavy drinkers were more positive). Implicit and explicit cognitions uniquely contributed to the prediction of 1-month prospective drinking. Heavy drinkers' implicit arousal associations could reflect the sensitized psychomotor-activating response to drug cues, a motivational mechanism hypothesized to underlie the etiology of addictive behaviors.     

Effects of being observed on learning following success and failure experiences

In two experiments female subjects performed a task either alone or while being observed by a female experimenter, after which they were told that they had performed well or poorly. On a paired-associates (PA) learning task that followed, subjects who performed in the presence of the observing experimenter required more trials to criterion and committed more errors than those who worked alone only if they had supposedly done poorly on the preceding task. Subjects who had done well on the prior task performed better on the PA task when observed than when alone provided that the preliminary task had also measured verbal learning. A measure of skin conductance indicated increased arousal under conditions of observation on the PA task only after a poor performance on the preceding task. The results are discussed in terms of the drive theory of social facilitation and the conditions under which being observed produces evaluation apprehension.     

The role of social perspective in perceiving the causes of success and failure1

An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that observers' causal attributions about an actor's performance at a task would be affected by their social perspective in observing the situation. Observer subjects were either assigned to serve in a role comparable to that of observer-subjects in most actor-observer experiments or were assigned a distinctive role more divergent from the social perspective of the actor. As expected, observers with a similar social perspective to that of the actor made more flattering attributions about the actor's performance than observers with a dissimilar social perspective. We concluded that actor-observer differences in attribution for an actor's performance in any one experiment cannot be taken as definitive evidence either for or against the defensive attribution idea.     

Effects of social stress on operant drinking of alcoholics and social drinkers

The relationship between social stress and alcohol consumption was examined in 10 alcoholics and 10 social drinkers matched on age and education. Drinking was measured via 10 minutes of operant responding whereby lever presses earned alcohol reinforcement on an FR-50 schedule. During stress conditions, subjects were exposed to simulated interpersonal encounters requiring assertive behavior. In terms of autonomie arousal, both groups were equally stressed. The no-stress condition consisted of non-threatening discussions of pleasurable spare time activities. Alcoholics significantly increased their operant responding to obtain alcohol following stress conditions while social drinkers did not.     

Instructed versus pharmacological effects of alcohol in alcoholics and social drinkers

Twelve alcoholics and 12 social drinkers were studied in an experiment where instructions about alcohol or placebo were orthogonally crossed with administration of alcohol or placebo in a Balanced Placebo Design. Three subjects were simultaneously observed while watching soccer games on the TV together and having free access to a mixed drink, which in the alcohol conditions contained 150ml of 80% proof vodka. The assessment procedure included several aspects of drinking behavior, behavioral observations during the session, psychiatric ratings and nurse observations before and after each session, ratings for craving, self-reported state anxiety and physiological changes (heart rate and blood pressure). In general, the results showed the alcoholic's behavior to be controlled by instruction-induced expectancies rather than by the actual beverage given, whereas the social drinkers showed tendencies in the opposite direction. The implications of these results for the traditional disease conception of alcoholism and for learning theory approaches are discussed.     

Pub and community: The views of Birmingham untreated heavy drinkers

This paper reports the results of a qualitative analysis of semi‐structured interviews with 79 members of the Birmingham Untreated Heavy Drinkers Cohort. The cohort was recruited in 1997 when all participants were drinking 50 or more standard units of alcohol (men) or 35 or more units (women) most weeks. Present interviews were carried out as part of the fourth wave of interviews, held in 2003. The topic was the participants' places of drinking in the community and the functions those places served. The present analysis focused on the relationship between pubs and community. The strongest theme to emerge was that the pub provided for many participants a real sense of community in itself. It did so by enabling participants to meet with like‐minded others, in a setting distinct from home or work, where conversing and confiding could take place in a relaxed atmosphere, with a range of other activities and forms of social support available to many. At the same time, participants were discriminating about which pubs they used, and when, and with whom they chose to interact. There was less consensus about whether the pub served a wider function by contributing to a positive sense of community in the local neighbourhood. It is suggested that English pubs, at least in a large conurbation such as the West Midlands, are very varied, sometimes continuing to serve as ‘the local’ for a community, sometimes being part of a variety of drinking places which between them provide people with a diversity of social niches to meet their increasingly diverse choices and preferences, and sometimes reflecting and even contributing to local community disorganisation. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Two components of need for approval score and their relationship to cheating following success and failure

Subjects completed a simulated “intelligence test” on which they were given bogus feedback indicating that they had either met college norms or had failed substantially to meet norms. Immediately following was a period in which subjects could modify their scores and believe that their modification would go undetected. The relationship of need for approval to “cheating” and amount of “cheating” was analyzed. The results supported an “avoidance” interpretation of approval motivation. Two separate components of need for approval score were identified and found to be differentially related to avoidance behavior for men and for women.     

Construal level mind-sets moderate self- and social stereotyping

Construal level theory suggests that events and objects can be represented at either a higher, more abstract level involving consideration of superordinate goals, desirability, global processing, and broad categorizations or a lower, more concrete level involving consideration of subordinate goals, feasibility, local processing, and narrow categorizations. Analogously, social targets (including the self) can be represented more broadly, as members of a group, or more narrowly, as individuals. Because abstract construals induce a similarity focus, they were predicted to increase the perceived fit between social targets and a salient social category. Accordingly, placing individuals into a more abstract construal mind-set via an unrelated task increased the activation and use of stereotypes of salient social groups, stereotype-consistent trait ratings of the self, group identification, and stereotype-consistent performance relative to more concrete construal mind-sets. Thus, nonsocial contextual influences (construal level mind-sets) affect stereotyping of self and others.     

When ambiguity hurts: social standards moderate self-appraisals in generalized social phobia

Thirty-nine individuals with generalized social phobia (social anxiety disorder) and 39 nonclinical controls performed a public speech after receiving cues about social standards. Using a novel video manipulation paradigm, one third of participants received cues indicating that standards for performance were high, one third received cues that standards were low, and the remaining third were given no explicit information about expected standards (i.e., standards were ambiguous). Individuals with social phobia performed objectively worse than controls in all conditions, but rated their performance as being worse only in the high and ambiguous standards conditions. These results suggest that in social phobia, negative self-perception is context-dependent. Implications for the cognitive model and treatment are discussed.