A series of studies tested whether people underestimate the likelihood that others will comply with their direct requests for help. In the first 3 studies, people underestimated by as much as 50% the likelihood that others would agree to a direct request for help, across a range of requests occurring in both experimental and natural field settings. Studies 4 and 5 demonstrated that experimentally manipulating a person’s perspective (as help seeker or potential helper) could elicit this underestimation effect. Finally, in Study 6, the authors explored the source of the bias, finding that help seekers were less willing than potential helpers were to appreciate the social costs of refusing a direct request for help (the costs of saying “no”), attending instead to the instrumental costs of helping (the costs of saying “yes”).
Individuals tend to overestimate their relative contributions to collaborative endeavors. Thus, the sum of group members! estimates of the percentage they each contributed to a joint task typically exceeds the logically allowable 100%. We suggest that this tendency stems partly from individuals! inclination to regard their fellow group members as a collective rather than as individuals, and that leading people to think about their collaborators as individuals should therefore reduce the perceive...
Most models of how perceivers infer the widespread attitudes and qualities of social groups revolve around either the self (social projection, false consensus) or stereotypes (stereotyping). The author suggests people rely on both of these inferential strategies, with perceived general similarity moderating their use, leading to increased levels of projection and decreased levels of stereotyping. Three studies featuring existing individual differences in perceived similarity as well as manipulat...
The authors propose that people adopt others’ perspectives by serially adjusting from their own. As predicted, estimates of others’ perceptions were consistent with one’s own but differed in a manner consistent with serial adjustment (Study 1). Participants were slower to indicate that another’s perception would be different from - rather than similar to - their own (Study 2). Egocentric biases increased under time pressure (Study 2) and decreased with accuracy incentives (Study 3). Egocentric b...
#1Thomas Blass(UMBC: University of Maryland, Baltimore County)H-Index: 16
Creator of the famous Obedience Experiments and originator of the "six degrees of separation" theory, Stanley Milgram transformed our understanding of human nature and continues to be one of the most important figures in psychology and beyond. In this sparkling biography, Thomas Blass captures the colorful personality and pioneering work of a visionary scientist who revealed the hidden workings of our social world. In this new paperback edition, he includes an afterword connecting Milgram's theo...
The present research examines episodes of favor exchange among peer employees. We posit that favor receivers' and favor givers' commitment to their exchange relationships with one another will be accounted for by different factors. As predicted, in 2 different organizational contexts, receivers' commitment to their relationships with givers was found to be more related to their judgments of the givers' interactional justice when performing the favor, whereas givers' commitment to their relations...
Last. Charles Stangor(UMD: University of Maryland, College Park)H-Index: 41
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Four experiments examined how an actor's intent and the harm experienced by a target influence judgments of prejudice and discrimination. The presence of intent increased the likelihood that participants judged an actor as prejudiced and the actor's behavior as discriminatory. When intent was uncertain, harm influenced judgments of the behavior, which in turn influenced judgments of the actor, and participants were more cautious in their judgments about an actor than an actor's behavior. Harm al...
Abstract Previous theory and research on exchange relationships offer conflicting predictions about how givers and receivers evaluate episodes of favor exchange. Whereas studies of egocentric biases suggest that favors are valued more by givers than by receivers, theory and research on interpersonal interaction norms suggest instead that favors are initially valued more by receivers than by givers. This seeming paradox may be partly reconciled by demonstrating that the nature of asymmetry in fav...
When people suffer an embarrassing blunder, social mishap, or public failure, they often feel that their image has been severely tarnished in the eyes of others. Four studies demonstrate that these fears are commonly exaggerated. Actors who imagined committing one of several social blunders (Study 1), who experienced a public intellectual failure (Studies 2 and 3), or who were described in an embarrassing way (Study 4) anticipated being judged more harshly by others than they actually were. Thes...
Sexual harassment studies that use hypothetical situations and retrospective surveys may overestimate the degree to which victims actually confront their harassers. The result is that immediate emotional reactions are little understood and victims are often taken to task for nonconfrontational behavior. To address this neglect, we describe our experimental investigation of immediate reactions to sexually harassing questions encountered during a realistic job interview. Behavioral and emotional r...
#1Yidan Yin(UCSD: University of California, San Diego)
#1Yidan Yin(UCSD: University of California, San Diego)H-Index: 1
Last. Pamela K. Smith(UCSD: University of California, San Diego)H-Index: 21
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Abstract When does saying no to a helping request hurt a person's influence? Across five studies, when someone was asked for help, saying no had two opposing effects on their actual and perceived influence by increasing their dominance, but decreasing their prestige. The cost of providing help moderated these effects. Overall, refusing to help decreased a person's influence when helping cost little time, effort, or money, compared to both agreeing to help and a control condition. This effect was...
Last. Tuheena Mukherjee(Indian Institute of Foreign Trade)H-Index: 3
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Providing help to a help-seeker depends on various factors such as the cost of helping, the presence of bystanders, empathy, distress, and characteristics of help-seekers. The present research explores the interplay of various factors when help is asked alone or accompanied, and how that influences helping behavior. We argue that help-providers will experience more empathy and distress for single help-seekers than multiple. Hence, we hypothesize that helping would be higher when the help-seekers...
Abstract Researchers have linked trait empathy to an individual's willingness to help others. We examine whether trait empathy also predicts people's expectations that others will help them. We posit that highly empathic people are more attuned to the emotional drivers of others' prosocial behavior—an intrinsic desire to help and the discomfort of refusing a help request. Such insight should make empathic people more optimistic that their own requests for help will be granted. In two studies of ...
#1Peter Seipel(University of South Carolina Lancaster)H-Index: 1
Moral relativists often defend their view as an inference to the best explanation of widespread and deep moral disagreement. Many philosophers have challenged this line of reasoning in recent years, arguing that moral objectivism provides us with ample resources to develop an equally or more plausible method of explanation. One of the most promising of these objectivist methods is what I call the self-interest explanation, the view that intractable moral diversity is due to the distorting effect...