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. These exaggerated fears were produced, in part, by the actors' tendency to be inordinately focused on their misfortunes and by their resulting failure to consider the wider range of situational factors that tend to moderate onlookers' impressions. Discussion focuses on additional mechanisms that may contribute to overly pessimistic expectations as well as the role of such expectations in producing unnecessary social anxiety.
Abstract Three studies examined people's estimates of the perceived variability of their appearance and behavior in the eyes of others. Whether assessing the manifest variability of their physical appearance (Studies 1a, 1b, and 1c), their athletic accomplishments (Study 2), or their performance on a popular videogame (Study 3), participants consistently overestimated the extent to which their ups and downs would be noted by observers. The results of Study 3 suggest that this bias stems in part ...
People typically believe they are more likely to engage in selfless, kind, and generous behaviors than their peers, a result that is both logically and statistically suspect. However, this oft-documented tendency presents an important ambiguity. Do people feel holier than thou because they harbor overly cynical views of their peers (but accurate impressions of themselves) or overly charitable views of themselves (and accurate impressions of their peers)? Four studies suggested it was the latter....
The durability bias, the tendency to overpredict the duration of affective reactions to future events, may be due in part to focalism, whereby people focus too much on the event in question and not enough on the consequences of other future events. If so, asking people to think about other future activities should reduce the durability bias. In Studies 1-3, college football fans were less likely to overpredict how long the outcome of a football game would influence their happiness if they first ...
This research provides evidence that people overestimate the extent to which their actions and appearance are noted by others, a phenomenon dubbed the spotlight effect. In Studies 1 and 2, participants who were asked to don a T-shirt depicting either a flattering or potentially embarrassing image overestimated the number of observers who would be able to recall what was pictured on the shirt. In Study 3, participants in a group discussion overestimated how prominent their positive and negative u...
1. Introduction: the role of affect in social cognition Joseph P. Forgas Part I. Fundamental Issues: The Interplay of Affect and Cognition: 2. Nonconscious and noncognitive affect Robert Zajonc 3. Challenge and threat: the interplay of affect and cognition Jim Blascovich and Wendy Berry Mendes 4. Affect and appraisal Craig A. Smith and Leslie D. Kirby Part II. The Informational Role of Affect: 5. Cognitive and clinical perspectives on mood dependent memory Eric Eich and Dawn Macauley 6. Some con...
A new theory of cognitive biases, called error management theory (EMT), proposes that psychological mechanisms are designed to be predictably biased when the costs of false-positive and false-negative errors were asymmetrical over evolutionary history. This theory explains known phenomena such as men's overperception of women's sexual intent, and it predicts new biases in social inference such as women's underestimation of men's commitment. In Study 1 (N = 217), the authors documented the commit...
We review a program of research that examines people s judgments about how they are seen by others. The research indicates that people tend to anchor on their own experience when making such judgments, with the result that their assessments are often egocentrically biased. Our review focuses on two biases in particular, the spotlight effect, or people s tendency to overestimate the extent to which their behavior and appearance are noticed and evaluated by others, and the illusion of transparency...
Evidence from several lab and field studies is presented that indicates that people have cynical intuitions about how others assess responsibility. Married couples (Study 1), video game enthusiasts (Study 2), debaters (Study 3), and darts players (Study 4) divided responsibility for a series of desirable and undesirable joint outcomes and estimated how others would apportion responsibility. In all studies, participants expected the responsibility allocations of others-but not their own-to be mot...
Previous research has highlighted the effects of receiving interpersonal touch on persuasion. In contrast, we examine initiating touch. Individuals instructed to touch engage in egocentric projection in which they project their own affective reaction onto their expectations for how the recipient will feel (i.e., empathic forecast), how they appear to the recipient (i.e., metaperception), and the evaluation of the interaction itself (i.e., interaction awkwardness). Touch initiators expect that re...
Last. Yao Lin(SNNU: Shaanxi Normal University)H-Index: 1
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The objective of this study was to examine a possible mediator role of self-integrity and a moderator role of self-stereotyping in the relationship between family functioning and negative emotions ...
#2Corey Petsnik(UM: University of Manitoba)H-Index: 1
: What kinds of social interactions help individuals recover from an embarrassing experience? The present experiment examined the possibility that whereas individuals do not benefit from interacting with someone who is merely trying to understand and empathize, they do benefit from interacting with someone who has undergone the same experience and thus accurately understands their feelings. The 'target' member of 142 dyads performed an embarrassing task in front of the 'perceiver', after which t...
As actors in a social world, people constantly engage in behaviors that put their traits and abilities on stage. But do actors understand the implications of these social performances for how others view them? Seven studies support an overblown implications effect: Actors overestimate how much observers think an actor’s one-off success or failure offers clear insight about the actor’s relevant trait. Actors overestimated how much observers would draw inferences about actors’ intelligence (Study ...
Although choosing to disclose self-relevant information can expose personal vulnerabilities, choosing not to disclose information poses risks of its own. In this article, we detail both intrapersonal and interpersonal costs of not disclosing. Ironically, some of these costs reflect the very ones concealers were hoping to avoid by not revealing their secrets. We then consider why secret keeping is so common if it is indeed so costly. Both misestimations of the costs and a blindness to less-daunti...
Regulators have expressed concerns about auditors' tendency to over-rely on imprecise compensating controls when evaluating the severity of control deficiencies. We provide evidence on whether prom...
#1Nicholas Epley(U of C: University of Chicago)H-Index: 46
#2Tal Eyal(BGU: Ben-Gurion University of the Negev)H-Index: 13
Abstract People care about the minds of others, attempting to understand others' thoughts, attitudes, beliefs, intentions, and emotions using a highly sophisticated process of social cognition. Others' minds are among the most complicated systems that any person will ever think about, meaning that inferences about them are also made imperfectly. Research on the processes that enable mental state inference has largely developed in isolation from research examining the accuracy of these inferences...