Communicative
Speak Up! Mistaken Beliefs About How Much to Talk in Conversations
Quinn Hirschi, Timothy Wilson & Daniel Gilbert
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
We hypothesized that people would exhibit a reticence bias, the incorrect belief that they will be more likable if they speak less than half the time in a conversation with a stranger, as well as halo ignorance, the belief that their speaking time should depend on their goal (e.g., to be liked vs. to be found interesting), when in fact, perceivers form global impressions of each other. In Studies 1 and 2, participants forecasted they should speak less than half the time when trying to be liked, but significantly more when trying to be interesting. In Study 3, we tested the accuracy of these forecasts by randomly assigning participants to speak for 30%, 40%, 50%, 60%, or 70% of the time in a dyadic conversation. Contrary to people's forecasts, they were more likable the more they spoke, and their partners formed global rather than differentiated impressions.
Public Speaking Aversion
Thomas Buser & Huaiping Yuan
Management Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Fear of public speaking is very common, but we know little about its implications for individuals and organizations. We establish public speaking aversion as an economically relevant preference using three steps. First, we use laboratory and classroom experiments to show that preferences for speaking in public vary strongly across individuals with many participants willing to give up significant amounts of money to avoid giving a short presentation in front of an audience. Second, we introduce two self-reported items to elicit preferences for speaking in public through surveys. We show that these items are strongly related to choices in the incentivized laboratory experiment and that public speaking aversion is distinct from established traits and preferences, including extraversion. Third, we elicit these items in a survey of business and economics students and show that public speaking aversion predicts career expectations. Public speaking-averse individuals avoid careers in management consulting and are more attracted to data analyst and back office careers.
Sensitizing the Behavioral-Immune System: The Power of Social Pain
Sandra Murray et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
People who believe they are invulnerable to infectious diseases often fail to protect themselves against the disease threats that others pose to them. The current paper hypothesizes that social pain - the experience of feeling interpersonally hurt or rejected - can sensitize the behavioral-immune system by giving people added reason to see others as worthy of protecting themselves against. We obtained four daily diary samples involving 2,794 participants who reported how hurt/rejected they felt by those they knew, how personally concerned they were about the spread of illness/COVID-19, and how vigilantly they engaged in self-protective behaviors to safeguard their health each day. An integrative data analysis revealed robust evidence that people who believed they were invulnerable to infectious disease engaged in more concerted efforts to protect themselves against the greater daily risk of contracting COVID-19 when being in acute social pain gave them added reason to see others as harmful to them.
The Language of Social Touch Is Intuitive and Quantifiable
Sarah McIntyre et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Touch is a powerful communication tool, but we have a limited understanding of the role played by particular physical features of interpersonal touch communication. In this study, adults living in Sweden performed a task in which messages (attention, love, happiness, calming, sadness, and gratitude) were conveyed by a sender touching the forearm of a receiver, who interpreted the messages. Two experiments (N = 32, N = 20) showed that within close relationships, receivers could identify the intuitive touch expressions of the senders, and we characterized the physical features of the touches associated with successful communication. Facial expressions measured with electromyography varied by message but were uncorrelated with communication performance. We developed standardized touch expressions and quantified the physical features with 3D hand tracking. In two further experiments (N = 20, N = 16), these standardized expressions were conveyed by trained senders and were readily understood by strangers unacquainted with the senders. Thus, the possibility emerges of a standardized, intuitively understood language of social touch.
Does hazing actually increase group solidarity? Re-examining a classic theory with a modern fraternity
Aldo Cimino & Benjamin Thomas
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Anthropologists and other social scientists have long suggested that severe initiations (hazing) increase group solidarity. Because hazing groups tend to be highly secretive, direct and on-site tests of this hypothesis in the real world are nearly non-existent. Using an American social fraternity, we report a longitudinal test of the relationship between hazing severity and group solidarity. We tracked six sets of fraternity inductees as they underwent the fraternity's months-long induction process. Our results provide little support for common models of solidarity and suggest that hazing may not be the social glue it has long been assumed to be.