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Choking Under Social Pressure: Social Monitoring Among the Lonely
Megan Knowles et al.
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, June 2015, Pages 805-821
Abstract:
Lonely individuals may decode social cues well but have difficulty putting such skills to use precisely when they need them - in social situations. In four studies, we examined whether lonely people choke under social pressure by asking participants to complete social sensitivity tasks framed as diagnostic of social skills or nonsocial skills. Across studies, lonely participants performed worse than nonlonely participants on social sensitivity tasks framed as tests of social aptitude, but they performed just as well or better than the nonlonely when the same tasks were framed as tests of academic aptitude. Mediational analyses in Study 3 and misattribution effects in Study 4 indicate that anxiety plays an important role in this choking effect. This research suggests that lonely individuals may not need to acquire social skills to escape loneliness; instead, they must learn to cope with performance anxiety in interpersonal interactions.
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Humblebragging: A Distinct - And Ineffective - Self-Presentation Strategy
Ovul Sezer, Francesca Gino & Michael Norton
Harvard Working Paper, April 2015
Abstract:
Humblebragging - bragging masked by a complaint - is a distinct and, given the rise of social media, increasingly ubiquitous form of self-promotion. We show that although people often choose to humblebrag when motivated to make a good impression, it is an ineffective self-promotional strategy. Five studies offer both correlational and causal evidence that humblebragging has both global costs - reducing liking and perceived sincerity - and specific costs: it is even ineffective in signaling the specific trait that that a person wants to promote. Moreover, humblebragging is less effective than simply complaining, because complainers are at least seen as sincere. Despite people's belief that combining bragging and complaining confers the benefits of both self-promotion strategies, humblebragging fails to pay off.
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Katharine Greenaway et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
There is growing recognition that identification with social groups can protect and enhance health and well-being, thereby constituting a kind of "social cure." The present research explores the role of control as a novel mediator of the relationship between shared group identity and well-being. Five studies provide evidence for this process. Group identification predicted significantly greater perceived personal control across 47 countries (Study 1), and in groups that had experienced success and failure (Study 2). The relationship was observed longitudinally (Study 3) and experimentally (Study 4). Manipulated group identification also buffered a loss of personal control (Study 5). Across the studies, perceived personal control mediated social cure effects in political, academic, community, and national groups. The findings reveal that the personal benefits of social groups come not only from their ability to make people feel good, but also from their ability to make people feel capable and in control of their lives.
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The Way I Make You Feel: Social Exclusion Enhances the Ability to Manage Others' Emotions
Elaine Cheung & Wendi Gardner
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, September 2015, Pages 59-75
Abstract:
Original conceptions of social exclusion focused upon the negative impact of exclusion on intelligent thought (Baumeister, Twenge, & Nuss, 2002). We propose that although exclusion may impair cognitive forms of intelligence, exclusion should enhance more socially relevant forms of intelligence, such as emotional intelligence. Specifically, we examined whether exclusion would enhance performance in one branch of emotional intelligence: the ability to manage others' emotions. Social exclusion heightened the number and breadth of strategies that participants used for managing others' emotions when responding to hypothetical scenarios (Study 1) and when responding to online pen pals (Studies 3 and 4). Furthermore, excluded participants were more effective at energizing an interaction partner in a face-to-face coaching interaction (Study 2) and were rated as more effective at managing their pen pal's emotions in an online pen pal exchange (Studies 3 and 4). Although exclusion heightened the number and breadth of emotion management strategies generated in a social task, exclusion did not heighten the number or breadth of nonsocial strategies (creative uses for common household items) generated in a comparison task (Study 4). Lastly, we found preliminary evidence suggesting that this enhanced emotion management after exclusion may serve to facilitate reconnection; excluded participants were liked more by their interaction partners (Study 2) and were rated to be more likable by objective coders (Studies 3 and 4). Altogether, these findings suggest that individuals may be more effective at managing others' emotions following social exclusion, and this greater effectiveness may promote reconnection.
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Bad habit or social good? How perceptions of gossiper morality are related to gossip content
Kim Peters & Yoshihisa Kashima
European Journal of Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
From a folk perspective, gossipers (individuals who talk about the behaviours of others) are considered to be immoral individuals, doing harm to those they discuss. However, this folk perspective sits uneasily with recent claims that gossipers may actually do some good. In particular, it has been suggested that gossipers who share diagnostic information about the morality of social targets may help audiences to identify targets who are trustworthy and those who are not. In this way, gossipers may help audiences adaptively regulate their relationships. In this paper, we examined whether audience perceptions of gossiper morality are influenced by their perceptions that the content of gossip is able to help them regulate their relationships. Participants in two scenario studies and a realistic interaction study were presented with gossip items drawn from a pool of 24 unique behavioural descriptions and asked to rate their perceptions of the gossiper and the content of the gossip item. As predicted, participants perceived gossipers as more moral when gossipers shared the diagnostic morality gossip that participants perceived to serve relationship regulatory functions.
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Competing for Attention in Social Communication Markets
Ganesh Iyer & Zsolt Katona
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
We investigate the incentives for social communication in the new social media technologies. Three features of online social communication are represented in the model. First, new social media platforms allow for increased connectivity; i.e., they enable sending messages to many more receivers, for the same fixed cost, compared to traditional word of mouth. Second, users contribute content because they derive status- or image-based utility from being listened to by their peers. Third, we capture the role of social differentiation, or how social distance between people affects their preferences for messages. In the model, agents endogenously decide whether to be a sender of information and then compete for the attention of receivers. An important point of this paper is that social communication incentives diminish even as the reach or the span of communication increases. As the span of communication increases, competition between senders for receiver attention becomes more intense, resulting in senders competing with greater equilibrium messaging effort. This in turn leads to lower equilibrium payoffs and the entry of fewer senders. This result provides a strategic rationale for the so-called participation inequality phenomenon, which is a characteristic of many social media platforms. We also show that social differentiation may enhance or deter sender entry depending on whether it can be endogenously influenced by senders. Finally, we examine how the underlying network structure (in terms of its density and its degree distribution) affects communication and uncover a nonmonotonic pattern in that increased connectivity first increases and then reduces the entry of senders.
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Harry Wallace et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prior studies have documented how people in general respond to others' narcissism, but existing research offers few clues about whether and how evaluator narcissism influences judgments of traits associated with narcissism. Participants completed the Narcissistic Personality Inventory and then evaluated hypothetical target persons. Target narcissism was conveyed through a single trait description (Study 1), a list of traits (Study 2), or Facebook content (Study 3). Narcissistic qualities were reliably viewed unfavorably, but narcissistic participants were comparatively less bothered by target narcissism and less positive in their judgments of targets without narcissistic qualities. In each study, symptoms of the presence or absence of narcissism had less impact on the social judgments of participants who were narcissistic.
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Harmony From Chaos? Perceptual-Motor Delays Enhance Behavioral Anticipation in Social Interaction
Auriel Washburn et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, forthcoming
Abstract:
Effective interpersonal coordination is fundamental to robust social interaction, and the ability to anticipate a coactor's behavior is essential for achieving this coordination. However, coordination research has focused on the behavioral synchrony that occurs between the simple periodic movements of coactors and, thus, little is known about the anticipation that occurs during complex, everyday interaction. Research on the dynamics of coupled neurons, human motor control, electrical circuits, and laser semiconductors universally demonstrates that small temporal feedback delays are necessary for the anticipation of chaotic events. We therefore investigated whether similar feedback delays would promote anticipatory behavior during social interaction. Results revealed that coactors were not only able to anticipate others' chaotic movements when experiencing small perceptual-motor delays, but also exhibited movement patterns of equivalent complexity. This suggests that such delays, including those within the human nervous system, may enhance, rather than hinder, the anticipatory processes that underlie successful social interaction.
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Irene Scopelliti, George Loewenstein & Joachim Vosgerau
Psychological Science, June 2015, Pages 903-914
Abstract:
People engage in self-promotional behavior because they want others to hold favorable images of them. Self-promotion, however, entails a trade-off between conveying one's positive attributes and being seen as bragging. We propose that people get this trade-off wrong because they erroneously project their own feelings onto their interaction partners. As a consequence, people overestimate the extent to which recipients of their self-promotion will feel proud of and happy for them, and underestimate the extent to which recipients will feel annoyed (Experiments 1 and 2). Because people tend to promote themselves excessively when trying to make a favorable impression on others, such efforts often backfire, causing targets of self-promotion to view self-promoters as less likeable and as braggarts (Experiment 3).
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A natural experiment of social network formation and dynamics
Tuan Phan & Edoardo Airoldi
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 26 May 2015, Pages 6595-6600
Abstract:
Social networks affect many aspects of life, including the spread of diseases, the diffusion of information, the workers' productivity, and consumers' behavior. Little is known, however, about how these networks form and change. Estimating causal effects and mechanisms that drive social network formation and dynamics is challenging because of the complexity of engineering social relations in a controlled environment, endogeneity between network structure and individual characteristics, and the lack of time-resolved data about individuals' behavior. We leverage data from a sample of 1.5 million college students on Facebook, who wrote more than 630 million messages and 590 million posts over 4 y, to design a long-term natural experiment of friendship formation and social dynamics in the aftermath of a natural disaster. The analysis shows that affected individuals are more likely to strengthen interactions, while maintaining the same number of friends as unaffected individuals. Our findings suggest that the formation of social relationships may serve as a coping mechanism to deal with high-stress situations and build resilience in communities.