Involving others
Validation of negativity: Drawbacks of interpersonal responsiveness during conflicts with outsiders
Edward Lemay et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The current research included 7 studies testing a model of interpersonal processes when people disclose to their close relationship partners (“confidants”) about their conflicts involving adversaries outside the dyad. The model posits that confidants who feel close to disclosers tend to adopt goals to be responsive to disclosers during these interactions, which motivates them to validate disclosers’ negativity toward their adversaries. Disclosers interpret this validation of negativity as responsive, which motivates them to continue confiding in these confidants, but also respond to this behavior with more negative moral evaluations of their adversaries, reduced willingness to forgive their adversaries, and reduced commitment to maintaining a relationship with their adversaries. Results of 3 cross-sectional studies, 3 experiments, and a behavioral observation study support this model. This research suggests potential drawbacks of partner responsiveness during discussions of conflicts, and suggests processes through which people reward, draw closer to, and depend on partners who validate negativity and, consequently, undermine conflict resolution with others.
I Didn’t Want to Offend You: The Cost of Avoiding Sensitive Questions
Einav Hart, Eric VanEpps & Maurice Schweitzer
University of Pennsylvania Working Paper, June 2019
Abstract:
Within a conversation, individuals balance competing concerns, such as the motive to gather information and the motives to avoid discomfort and to create a favorable impression. Across three pilot studies and four experimental studies, we demonstrate that individuals avoid asking sensitive questions, because they fear making others uncomfortable and because of impression management concerns. We demonstrate that this aversion to asking sensitive questions is both costly and misguided. Even when we incentivized participants to ask sensitive questions, participants were reluctant to do so in both face-to-face and computer-mediated chat conversations. Interestingly, rather than accurately anticipating how sensitive questions will influence impression formation, we find that question askers significantly overestimate the interpersonal costs of asking sensitive questions. Across our studies, individuals formed similarly favorable impressions of partners who asked non-sensitive (e.g., “Are you a morning person?”) and sensitive (e.g., “What are your views on abortion?”) questions, despite askers’ reticence to ask sensitive questions.
It's lonely at the bottom (too): The effects of experienced powerlessness on social closeness and disengagement
Trevor Foulk et al.
Personnel Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although powerlessness is a pervasive experience for employees, prior social power research has predominantly focused on consequences of powerfulness. This has led to contradictory predictions for how experienced powerlessness influences employees’ social perceptions and behaviors. To resolve this theoretical tension, we build on Social Distance Theory (Magee & Smith, 2013) to develop a theoretical model suggesting that experienced powerlessness reduces social closeness and subsequently causes social disengagement behaviors both at work (reduced helping, increased interaction avoidance) and at home (increased withdrawal). Our model also elucidates the processes that cause powerlessness to reduce social closeness, demonstrating that employees’ affiliation motive and their expectation of others’ interest in affiliating explain this relationship. We further propose that the effect of powerlessness on social closeness will be stronger for employees high (vs. low) in political skill because these employees are more attuned to workplace power dynamics. We find support for our model in an experience‐sampling field experiment and two experimental scenario studies. Our research clarifies the effects of powerlessness on social closeness and organizationally‐relevant downstream consequences, qualifies dominant assumptions that the powerless always behave in ways opposite those of the powerful, and demonstrates the importance of political skill as a moderator of power's effects.
A new perspective on the social functions of emotions: Gratitude and the witnessing effect
Sara Algoe et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We propose a novel theoretical and empirical approach to studying group-level social functions of emotions and use it to make new predictions about social consequences of gratitude. Here, we document the witnessing effect: In social groups, emotional expressions are often observed by third-party witnesses - family members, coworkers, friends, and neighbors. Emotional expressions coordinate group living by changing third-party witnesses’ behavior toward first-party emotion expressers and toward second-party people to whom emotion is expressed. In 8 experiments (N = 1,817), we test this for gratitude, hypothesizing that third-party witnesses will be more helpful and affiliative toward a first party who expressed gratitude to a second party, as well as toward the second party, and why. In Experiments 1-3, participants who witnessed a “thank you” in 1 line of text, expressed to someone who previously helped the grateful person, were themselves more helpful toward the grateful person. In Experiment 4, witnesses of gratitude expressed to someone else via video recording subsequently self-disclosed more to the grateful person, and in Experiment 5 wanted to affiliate more with the grateful person and with the person toward whom gratitude was expressed. Experiments 6-8 used within-subjects designs to test hypothesized behavioral and social-perceptual mechanisms for these effects, with videos of real gratitude expressions. Gratitude may help build multiple relationships within a social network directly and simultaneously. By specifying proximal interpersonal mechanisms for reverberating consequences of 1 person’s communicated emotion, the present work advances theory on the group-level functions of emotions.
Your Soul Spills Out: The Creative Act Feels Self-Disclosing
Jack Goncalo & Joshua Katz
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, forthcoming
Abstract:
Breaking from the typical focus on the antecedents of creativity, we investigate the psychological and interpersonal consequences of being creative. Across five experiments, we find that generating creative ideas is revealing of the self and thus prompts the perception of self-disclosure. Individuals respond to the expectation to be creative with greater self-focus - adopting their own idiosyncratic perspective on the task and thinking about their own personal preferences and experiences in connection to the problem. Because creative ideas derived from self-focused attention are uniquely personal, the act of sharing a creative idea is, in turn, perceived to be revealing of the self. Finally, an interactive dyad study shows that sharing creative ideas makes partners more confident in the accuracy of judgments they made about each other’s personality. We discuss the implications of our findings for future research investigating the consequences of creativity.