Journal of personality and social psychology
-
Comparative Study
Need for cognition, task difficulty, and the formation of performance expectancies.
In the present article, the authors analyze how performance expectancies are generated and how they affect actual performance. The authors predicted that task difficulty would affect performance expectancies only when cognitive motivation (i.e., need for cognition [NFC]) and cognitive capacity are high. This should be the case because analyzing task difficulty is a process requiring cognitive capacity as well as cognitive motivation. ⋯ This hypothesis was supported: Significant relations between performance expectancies and actual performance were found only for difficult tasks and for participants higher in NFC. Studies 5 and 6 showed clear evidence that the NFC x Difficulty interaction could not be explained by differences in the use of task-specific self-concepts. The findings were robust across academic, social, and physical tasks.
-
Research has established that acts of self-control deplete a resource required for subsequent self-control tasks. The present investigation revealed that a psychological intervention-self-affirmation-facilitates self-control when the resource has been depleted. ⋯ Experiments 3 and 4 suggested that self-affirmation improves self-control by promoting higher levels (vs. lower levels) of mental construal. Self-affirmation therefore holds promise as a mental strategy that reduces the likelihood of self-control failure.
-
When does procedural unfairness result in retaliation, and why do recipients of unfair treatment sometimes pursue and other times inhibit retaliation? Five studies addressed these questions. The authors proposed and found that regulatory focus moderates retaliation against an unfairness-enacting authority: Promotion-focus participants were more likely to retaliate than prevention-focus participants. ⋯ In fact, prevention-focus participants were as retaliatory as promotion-focus participants under conditions of high individual-self accessibility. Implications for the procedural fairness and regulatory focus literatures are discussed, and suggestions for future research are offered.
-
Extant research suggests that targets' emotion expressions automatically evoke similar affect in perceivers. The authors hypothesized that the automatic impact of emotion expressions depends on group membership. In Experiments 1 and 2, an affective priming paradigm was used to measure immediate and preconscious affective responses to same-race or other-race emotion expressions. ⋯ In contrast, facial expressions of fear elicited less fear in outgroup than in ingroup perceivers. In Experiment 5, felt dominance mediated emotional responses to ingroup and outgroup vocal emotion. These data support a signal-value model in which emotion expressions signal environmental conditions.
-
Two preliminary studies and 5 experiments examined judgments of leaders who challenge their group's norms. Participants viewed information about group members whose attitudes were normative or deviated in a pronormative or antinormative direction. ⋯ Results are discussed in terms of the idea that leadership can accrue from prototypicality and can also confer the right to define prescriptive norms. However, innovation credit is only granted in the case of future leaders.