Journal of personality and social psychology
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Nine studies demonstrated that perspective-takers are particularly likely to adopt a target's positive and negative stereotypical traits and behaviors. Perspective-takers rated both positive and negative stereotypic traits of targets as more self-descriptive. As a result, taking the perspective of a professor led to improved performance on an analytic task, whereas taking the perspective of a cheerleader led to decreased performance, in line with the respective stereotypes of professors and cheerleaders. ⋯ Ku, & C. S. Wang, 2005) that perspective-takers utilize information, including stereotypes, to coordinate their behavior with others and provide key theoretical insights into the processes of both perspective-taking and behavioral priming.
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Researchers interested in counterfactual thinking have often found that upward counterfactual thoughts lead to increased motivation to improve in the future, although at the cost of increased negative affect. The present studies suggest that because upward counterfactual thoughts indicate reasons for a poor performance, they can also serve as excuses. In this case, upward counterfactual thoughts should result in more positive self-esteem and reduced future motivation. ⋯ Second, upward counterfactual thoughts indicating the presence of a self-handicap protected self-esteem following failure. Finally, upward counterfactual thoughts that protect self-esteem reduced preparation for a subsequent performance as well as performance itself. These findings suggest that the consequences of upward counterfactuals for affect and motivation are moderated by the goals of the individual as well as the content of the thoughts.
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Do high levels of neuroticism predict intimate partner violence (IPV)? Although neuroticism may predispose partners to increased risks of IPV perpetration, the extent to which it predicts such perpetration is likely to depend on the broader context of the relationship. Consistent with this prediction, the current longitudinal study of 169 community couples revealed that the effects of neuroticism on IPV perpetration over the first 4 years of marriage were moderated by observations of problem-solving behavior and objective ratings of chronic stress. Specifically, although husbands and wives who scored higher on a measure of neuroticism at the outset of marriage engaged in more IPV throughout the marriage on average, those who possessed more effective problem-solving skills or experienced lower levels of stress were significantly less likely to engage in IPV. Results highlight the importance of considering the broader relationship context when examining predictors of specific interpersonal processes.
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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").
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In 7 different studies, the authors observed that a large number of thinking biases are uncorrelated with cognitive ability. These thinking biases include some of the most classic and well-studied biases in the heuristics and biases literature, including the conjunction effect, framing effects, anchoring effects, outcome bias, base-rate neglect, "less is more" effects, affect biases, omission bias, myside bias, sunk-cost effect, and certainty effects that violate the axioms of expected utility theory. In a further experiment, the authors nonetheless showed that cognitive ability does correlate with the tendency to avoid some rational thinking biases, specifically the tendency to display denominator neglect, probability matching rather than maximizing, belief bias, and matching bias on the 4-card selection task. The authors present a framework for predicting when cognitive ability will and will not correlate with a rational thinking tendency.