Friday, June 10, 2011
Status Update
The cognitive consequences of envy: Attention, memory, and self-regulatory depletion
Sarah Hill, Danielle DelPriore & Phillip Vaughan
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
In a series of 4 experiments, we provide evidence that - in addition to having an affective component - envy may also have important consequences for cognitive processing. Our first experiment (N = 69) demonstrated that individuals primed with envy better attended to and more accurately recalled information about fictitious peers than did a control group. Studies 2 (N = 187) and 3 (N = 65) conceptually replicated these results, demonstrating that envy elicited by targets predicts attention and later memory for information about them. We demonstrate that these effects cannot be accounted for by admiration or changes in negative affect or arousal elicited by the targets. Study 4 (N = 152) provides evidence that greater memory for envied - but not neutral - targets leads to diminished perseverance on a difficult anagram task. Findings demonstrate that envy may play an important role in attention and memory systems and deplete limited self-regulatory resources available for acts of volition.
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The Allure of Status: High-Status Targets Are Privileged in Face Processing and Memory
Nathaniel Ratcliff et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
The current research tests the hypothesis that face processing is attuned to high-status faces. Across three experiments, faces of high-status targets were better recognized than faces of low-status targets. In Experiment 2, this memory advantage for high-status targets also extended to an attentional bias toward high-status targets and to stronger sociospatial memory (identity-location link) for high-status targets. Finally, Experiment 3 finds that high-status faces received more expert-style holistic processing than did low-status faces. This suggests that high-status faces also benefit more from the strategic deployment of expert face processing resources than low-status faces. Taken together, these data indicate that perceivers strategically allocate face processing resources to targets perceived to be high in status.
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Power and Choice: Their Dynamic Interplay in Quenching the Thirst for Personal Control
Ena Inesi et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Power and choice represent two fundamental forces that govern human behavior. Scholars have largely treated power as an interpersonal construct involving control over other individuals, whereas choice has largely been treated as an intrapersonal construct that concerns the ability to select a preferred course of action. Although these constructs have historically been studied separately, we propose that they share a common foundation, with both rooted in an individual's sense of personal control. Because of this common underlying basis, we predicted that power and choice are substitutable: the absence of one increases the desire for the other, which, when acquired, serves to satisfy the broader need for control. We also predicted that choice and power would exhibit a threshold effect: once one source of control has been provided (e.g., power) the addition of the other (e.g., choice) will yield diminishing returns. Six experiments provide evidence supportive of these predictions.
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Erika Carlson, Simine Vazire & Thomas Oltmanns
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Do narcissists have insight into the negative aspects of their personality and reputation? Using both clinical and subclinical measures of narcissism, the authors examined others' perceptions, self-perceptions, and meta-perceptions of narcissists across a wide range of traits for a new acquaintance and close other (Study 1), longitudinally with a group of new acquaintances (Study 2), and among coworkers (Study 3). Results bring 3 surprising conclusions about narcissists: (a) they understand that others see them less positively than they see themselves (i.e., their meta-perceptions are less biased than are their self-perceptions), (b) they have some insight into the fact that they make positive first impressions that deteriorate over time, and (c) they have insight into their narcissistic personality (e.g., they describe themselves as arrogant). These findings shed light on some of the psychological mechanisms underlying narcissism.
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Erin Shoulberg, Jelle Sijtsema & Dianna Murray-Close
Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, September 2011, Pages 20-37
Abstract:
The association between having a reputation for valuing popularity and relational aggression was assessed in a sample of 126 female children and adolescents (mean age = 12.43 years) at a 54-day residential summer camp for girls. Having a reputation for valuing popularity was positively related to relational aggression. This association was moderated by both popularity and physiological reactivity to social exclusion (i.e., respiratory sinus arrhythmia reactivity [RSAR] and heart rate reactivity [HRR]). Popular girls with a reputation for valuing popularity were at greater risk for engaging in relational aggression when they also exhibited blunted reactivity to social exclusion. Conversely, girls who had a reputation for valuing popularity but were not popular (i.e., the "wannabes") were at risk for engaging in relational aggression when they exhibited heightened reactivity to exclusion.
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Social Class Rank, Threat Vigilance, and Hostile Reactivity
Michael Kraus et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Lower-class individuals, because of their lower rank in society, are theorized to be more vigilant to social threats relative to their high-ranking upper-class counterparts. This class-related vigilance to threat, the authors predicted, would shape the emotional content of social interactions in systematic ways. In Study 1, participants engaged in a teasing interaction with a close friend. Lower-class participants - measured in terms of social class rank in society and within the friendship - more accurately tracked the hostile emotions of their friend. As a result, lower-class individuals experienced more hostile emotion contagion relative to upper-class participants. In Study 2, lower-class participants manipulated to experience lower subjective socioeconomic rank showed more hostile reactivity to ambiguous social scenarios relative to upper-class participants and to lower-class participants experiencing elevated socioeconomic rank. The results suggest that class affects expectations, perception, and experience of hostile emotion, particularly in situations in which lower-class individuals perceive their subordinate rank.
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Eric Anderson et al.
Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Gossip is a form of affective information about who is friend and who is foe. We show that gossip does not impact only how a face is evaluated - it affects whether a face is seen in the first place. In two experiments, neutral faces were paired with negative, positive, or neutral gossip and were then presented alone in a binocular rivalry paradigm (faces were presented to one eye, houses to the other). In both studies, faces previously paired with negative (but not positive or neutral) gossip dominated longer in visual consciousness. These findings demonstrate that gossip, as a potent form of social affective learning, can influence vision in a completely top-down manner, independent of the basic structural features of a face.
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Interhemispheric interaction and egocentrism: The role of handedness in social comparative judgement
Jason Rose, John Jasper & Ryan Corser
British Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous research has shown that people are egocentrically biased when making judgements that require a self-to-peer comparison - leading to above-/below-average effects and comparative optimism/pessimism. Two experiments examined whether interhemispheric brain connectivity (assessed via strength of handedness) is associated with egocentrism in the comparative judgement process. In Experiment 1, strong handers (SH) and mixed handers (MH) made percentile rank judgements about their abilities in easy and hard domains. In Experiment 2, SH and MH judged their likelihoods of outperforming a co-participant in easy and hard tasks. Both experiments showed that SH were more egocentric than MH and thus showed (a) more above- and below-average effects when estimating their abilities (Experiment 1) and (b) generally larger optimism biases when predicting performances in a competition (Experiment 2). Taken together, these experiments provide evidence that underlying interhemispheric connectivity shapes egocentrism in comparative judgement.
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Brandon Brooks et al.
Information, Communication & Society, June 2011, Pages 529-549
Abstract:
There are numerous indirect ways in which socioeconomic status (SES) can advantage or disadvantage people in developing social capital. Specifically, SES affects the access individuals have to beneficial resources that indirectly affects the social capital benefits individuals receive from personal and group social networks. With the advent of social network sites like Facebook, the ability to quantify and measure the effects of SES on social capital benefits is possible to a much greater degree than ever before. This study of undergraduate students focuses on the relationship between SES and social capital. We examine the relationship between SES and three structural measures of students' social capital using online social network data: general social capital (network size), bridging social capital (number of clusters), and bonding social capital (average degree). According to our results, higher SES relates to larger and denser networks, but not to networks with more clusters. These findings suggest that SES is not related to greater opportunities for networking, but better capitalization of existing network contexts. In addition to the novel substantive contribution, this paper offers a methodological advance in the structural study of social capital, which has previously been limited in size or complexity due to recall.
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The Advantage of Standing Up to Fight and the Evolution of Habitual Bipedalism in Hominins
David Carrier
PLoS ONE, May 2011, e19630
Background: Many quadrupedal species stand bipedally on their hindlimbs to fight. This posture may provide a performance advantage by allowing the forelimbs to strike an opponent with the range of motion that is intrinsic to high-speed running, jumping, rapid braking and turning; the range of motion over which peak force and power can be produced.
Methodology/Principal Findings: To test the hypothesis that bipedal (i.e., orthograde) posture provides a performance advantage when striking with the forelimbs, I measured the force and energy produced when human subjects struck from "quadrupedal" (i.e., pronograde) and bipedal postures. Downward and upward directed striking energy was measured with a custom designed pendulum transducer. Side and forward strikes were measured with a punching bag instrumented with an accelerometer. When subjects struck downward from a bipedal posture the work was 43.70±12.59% (mean ± S.E.) greater than when they struck from a quadrupedal posture. Similarly, 47.49±17.95% more work was produced when subjects struck upward from a bipedal stance compared to a quadrupedal stance. Importantly, subjects did 229.69±44.19% more work in downward than upward directed strikes. During side and forward strikes the force impulses were 30.12±3.68 and 43.04±9.00% greater from a bipedal posture than a quadrupedal posture, respectively.
Conclusions/Significance: These results indicate that bipedal posture does provide a performance advantage for striking with the forelimbs. The mating systems of great apes are characterized by intense male-male competition in which conflict is resolved through force or the threat of force. Great apes often fight from bipedal posture, striking with both the fore- and hindlimbs. These observations, plus the findings of this study, suggest that sexual selection contributed to the evolution of habitual bipedalism in hominins.
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A dynamic analysis of the effects of intelligence and socioeconomic background on job-market success
Yoav Ganzach
Intelligence, March-April 2011, Pages 120-129
Abstract:
We compare the effects of socioeconomic background (SEB) and intelligence on wage trajectories in a dynamic growth modeling framework in a sample that had completed just 12 years of education. I show that the main difference between the two is that SEB affected wages solely by its effect on entry pay whereas intelligence affected wages primarily by its effect on mobility. I argue that a major issue that has been at the center of the debate about the roles of intelligence and SEB in social success - the difficulty in accurately measuring SEB - is to a large extent resolved by these results.
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Maria Agthe, Matthias Spörrle & Jon Maner
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Previous studies of organizational decision making demonstrate an abundance of positive biases directed toward highly attractive individuals. The current research, in contrast, suggests that when the person being evaluated is of the same sex as the evaluator, attractiveness hurts, rather than helps. Three experiments assessing evaluations of potential job candidates (Studies 1 and 3) and university applicants (Study 2) demonstrated positive biases toward highly attractive other-sex targets but negative biases toward highly attractive same-sex targets. This pattern was mediated by variability in participants' desire to interact with versus avoid the target individual (Studies 1 and 2) and was moderated by participants' level of self-esteem (Study 3); the derogation of attractive same-sex targets was not observed among people with high self-esteem. Findings demonstrate an important exception to the positive effects of attractiveness in organizational settings and suggest that negative responses to attractive same-sex targets stem from perceptions of self-threat.
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Jochim Hansen & Michaela Wänke
Journal of Economic Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The purchase of luxury goods is relatively exclusive, limited, and often merely hypothetical. Thus, luxury goods may be perceived as more psychologically distant than ordinary goods. Based on the link between psychological distance and abstract mental representation, we hypothesized and found in three studies that both consumers and advertisers describe luxury products in more abstract language than they describe ordinary products, and that abstract product descriptions are perceived as more luxurious than concrete product descriptions.
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John Griffin, David Nickerson & Abigail Wozniak
NBER Working Paper, May 2011
Abstract:
The distinct historical and cultural experiences of American blacks and whites may influence whether members of those groups perceive a particular exchange as fair. We investigate racial differences in fairness standards using preferences for equal treatment in the ultimatum game, where responders choose to allow a proposed division of a monetary amount or to block it. Although previous research has studied group differences in the ultimatum game, no study has been able to examine these across races in America. We use a sample of over 1600 blacks and whites drawn from the universe of registered voters in three states and merged with information on neighborhood income and racial composition. We experimentally vary proposed divisions as well as the implied race of the ultimatum game proposer. We find no overall racial differences in acceptance rates or aversion to unequal divisions. However, we uncover racial differences in the response to pecuniary returns conditional on inequality of the division. This is driven by the lowest income group in our sample, which represents the 10th percentile of the black income distribution. The racial differences are robust across gender and age groups. We also find that blacks are more sensitive to unfair proposals from other blacks.
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Power Fosters Context-Independent, Analytic Cognition
Yuri Miyamoto & Li-Jun Ji
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
The present research tested the hypothesis that power, defined as the capacity to influence others, promotes analytic cognitive processing, by examining the use of linguistic categories and the categorization of objects. Supporting the hypothesis, recalling instances of influencing others facilitated the use of adjectives and discouraged the use of verbs to describe others (Study 1). Recalling instances of influencing others also promoted taxonomic, instead of thematic, categorization (Study 2). Furthermore, the authors also examined the effect of power in a real-life context. They examined whether socioeconomic status (SES) differences in cognitive processing can be partly explained by sense of agency, an antecedent of power (Study 3); high SES individuals made more taxonomic categorization than did low SES individuals, and a sense of agency partially mediated the SES differences in categorization. These findings underscore the role of power in shaping cognitive processes.
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Alessandra Geraci & Luca Surian
Developmental Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
The problem of how to distribute available resources among members of a group is a central aspect of social life. Adults react negatively to inequitable distributions and several studies have reported negative reactions to inequity also in non-human primates and dogs. We report two experiments on infants' reactions to equal and unequal distributions. In two experiments, infants' looking times and manual choices provide, for the first time, converging evidence suggesting that infants aged 12 to 18 months (mean age 16 months) attend to the outcomes of distributive actions to evaluate agents' actions and to reason about agents' dispositions. The results provide support for recent theoretical proposals on the developmental roots of social evaluation skills and a sense of fairness.
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Being Barbie: The Size of One's Own Body Determines the Perceived Size of the World
Björn van der Hoort, Arvid Guterstam & Henrik Ehrsson
PLoS ONE, May 2011, e20195
Abstract:
A classical question in philosophy and psychology is if the sense of one's body influences how one visually perceives the world. Several theoreticians have suggested that our own body serves as a fundamental reference in visual perception of sizes and distances, although compelling experimental evidence for this hypothesis is lacking. In contrast, modern textbooks typically explain the perception of object size and distance by the combination of information from different visual cues. Here, we describe full body illusions in which subjects experience the ownership of a doll's body (80 cm or 30 cm) and a giant's body (400 cm) and use these as tools to demonstrate that the size of one's sensed own body directly influences the perception of object size and distance. These effects were quantified in ten separate experiments with complementary verbal, questionnaire, manual, walking, and physiological measures. When participants experienced the tiny body as their own, they perceived objects to be larger and farther away, and when they experienced the large-body illusion, they perceived objects to be smaller and nearer. Importantly, despite identical retinal input, this "body size effect" was greater when the participants experienced a sense of ownership of the artificial bodies compared to a control condition in which ownership was disrupted. These findings are fundamentally important as they suggest a causal relationship between the representations of body space and external space. Thus, our own body size affects how we perceive the world.
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Managing Self-Confidence: Theory and Experimental Evidence
Markus Mobius et al.
NBER Working Paper, May 2011
Abstract:
Evidence from social psychology suggests that agents process information about their own ability in a biased manner. This evidence has motivated exciting research in behavioral economics, but has also garnered critics who point out that it is potentially consistent with standard Bayesian updating. We implement a direct experimental test. We study a large sample of 656 undergraduate students, tracking the evolution of their beliefs about their own relative performance on an IQ test as they receive noisy feedback from a known data-generating process. Our design lets us repeatedly measure the complete relevant belief distribution incentive-compatibly. We find that subjects (1) place approximately full weight on their priors, but (2) are asymmetric, over-weighting positive feedback relative to negative, and (3) conservative, updating too little in response to both positive and negative signals. These biases are substantially less pronounced in a placebo experiment where ego is not at stake. We also find that (4) a substantial portion of subjects are averse to receiving information about their ability, and that (5) less confident subjects are causally more likely to be averse. We unify these phenomena by showing that they all arise naturally in a simple model of optimally biased Bayesian information processing.
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The psychological impact of intragenerational social class mobility
Jason Houle
Social Science Research, May 2011, Pages 757-772
Abstract:
This study revisits and extends a classic question in sociology and tests three competing hypotheses about the effects of intragenerational social class mobility on distress and psychological well-being at midlife. Prior research on this topic investigated the effects of intergenerational mobility, but did not look at how mobility during adulthood (intragenerational mobility) affects psychological distress and well-being. Previous literature is also limited by methodological problems that make it difficult to estimate the separate effects of prior social class, current social class, and social mobility. This study overcomes this methodological problem using a novel approach that breaks the linear dependence between prior class, current class, and intragenerational mobility. After accounting for prior and current class, I find that social mobility is not associated with psychological distress and self-acceptance. Instead, mobile individuals come to resemble their nonmobile counterparts in their current class on the outcomes of study.
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Thomas Mussweiler & Jennifer Mayer
Psychological Science, June 2011, Pages 718-723
Abstract:
Comparison is one of the most ubiquitous and versatile components in human information processing. Social comparisons in particular have multifaceted judgmental, affective, behavioral, and motivational consequences. Initially, the consequences of nonsocial comparisons may appear to be less complex than the consequences of social comparisons. Comparing a smaller circle with a larger circle, for example, has little motivational relevance. Across two studies, however, we demonstrated that different types of nonsocial comparisons influence the motivational underpinnings of participants' subsequent performance. Participants who were perceptually or numerically induced to compare upward (e.g., to compare a smaller stimulus with a larger stimulus) in a first task traded accuracy for speed in a subsequent unrelated performance task. Conversely, participants who had compared downward traded speed for accuracy. These trade-offs are indicative of promotion- and prevention-focused motivational orientations, respectively. Comparing a geometric circle with a "superior" (e.g., larger) circle seems to yield promotion-focused strategic orientations similar to those produced by comparing oneself to a person one perceives as superior. These findings demonstrate the surprising motivational power of nonsocial comparisons.
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Martina Ly et al.
Current Biology, 28 April 2011, Pages 794-797
Abstract:
The enormous influence of hierarchical rank on social interactions suggests that neural mechanisms exist to process status-related information and ascribe value to it. The ventral striatum is prominently implicated in processing value and salience, independent of hedonic properties, and a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study of social status perception in humans demonstrated that viewing higher-ranked compared to lower-ranked individuals evokes a ventral striatal response, indicative of a greater assignment of value/salience to higher status. Consistent with this interpretation, nonhuman primates value information associated with higher-ranked conspecifics more than lower-ranked, as illustrated using a choice paradigm in which monkeys preferentially take the opportunity to view high-status monkeys. Interestingly, this status-related value assignment in nonhuman primates is influenced by one's own hierarchical rank: high-status monkeys preferentially attend to conspecifics of high status, whereas low-status monkeys will also attend to other low-status monkeys. Complementary to these findings, using fMRI and a social status judgment task in humans, we suggest a neurobiological mechanism by which one's own relative hierarchical rank influences the value attributed to particular social status information by demonstrating that one's subjective socioeconomic status differentially influences ventral striatal activity during processing of status-related information.
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Imitation in young children: When who gets copied is more important than what gets copied
Mark Nielsen & Cornelia Blank
Developmental Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Unlike other animals, human children will copy all of an adult's goal-directed actions, including ones that are clearly unnecessary for achieving the demonstrated goal. Here we highlight how social affiliation is key to this species-specific behavior. Preschoolers watched 2 adults retrieve a toy from a novel apparatus. One adult included irrelevant actions in her demonstration; the other only used actions causally related to opening the apparatus. After both adults took turns demonstrating, 1 left the test room, and the remaining adult gave the apparatus to the child. Children reproduced the irrelevant actions only when given the apparatus by the adult who had demonstrated them, even though the departed adult's actions emphasized how unnecessary these redundant actions were. Our results highlight the specialized skills for participating in cultural groups that have evolved in humans and provide insight into why finding such high fidelity copying in other animals has proven elusive.
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Distinct physiological and behavioural functions for parental alleles of imprinted Grb10
Alastair Garfield et el.
Nature, 27 January 2011, Pages 534-538
Abstract:
Imprinted genes, defined by their preferential expression of a single parental allele, represent a subset of the mammalian genome and often have key roles in embryonic development, but also postnatal functions including energy homeostasis and behaviour. When the two parental alleles are unequally represented within a social group (when there is sex bias in dispersal and/or variance in reproductive success), imprinted genes may evolve to modulate social behaviour, although so far no such instance is known. Predominantly expressed from the maternal allele during embryogenesis, Grb10 encodes an intracellular adaptor protein that can interact with several receptor tyrosine kinases and downstream signalling molecules. Here we demonstrate that within the brain Grb10 is expressed from the paternal allele from fetal life into adulthood and that ablation of this expression engenders increased social dominance specifically among other aspects of social behaviour, a finding supported by the observed increase in allogrooming by paternal Grb10-deficient animals. Grb10 is, therefore, the first example of an imprinted gene that regulates social behaviour. It is also currently alone in exhibiting imprinted expression from each of the parental alleles in a tissue-specific manner, as loss of the peripherally expressed maternal allele leads to significant fetal and placental overgrowth. Thus Grb10 is, so far, a unique imprinted gene, able to influence distinct physiological processes, fetal growth and adult behaviour, owing to actions of the two parental alleles in different tissues.
