To do, or not to do
When Tex and Tess Carpenter Build Houses in Texas: Moderators of Implicit Egotism
Brett Pelham & Carvallo Mauricio
Self and Identity, forthcoming
Abstract:
Implicit egotism is an unconscious preference for things resembling the self. Four studies provided unprecedented evidence for implicit egotism. Study 1 used census data to show that men disproportionately worked in 11 traditionally male occupations whose titles matched their surnames (e.g., baker, carpenter, farmer). Study 2 used statewide marriage records to show that people disproportionately married others who shared their birthday numbers. Study 3 showed that men named Cal and Tex disproportionately moved to states resembling their names. Study 4 showed how it is possible to reverse implicit egotism in naming preferences. All four studies controlled for important confounds (e.g., gender, ethnicity, education), identified theoretically predictable moderators (e.g., implicit self-esteem, social status), or both. Future research should focus on other theoretically derived moderators of implicit egotism.
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Kaitlin Woolley & Ayelet Fishbach
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We document a shift in the value assigned to intrinsic incentives: people value these incentives more inside an activity than outside the activity (i.e., during vs. before or after pursuit). For example, people care more about the level of interest of their present work task than of past or future work tasks. We document this shift across a variety of activities (exercising, visiting a museum, and lab tasks) and using various measures, including rated importance of intrinsic incentives inside and outside pursuit, actual and planned persistence on activities that offer these incentives, and regret when choosers outside pursuit forgo intrinsic incentives that pursuers later seek. This shift in valuation occurs because intrinsic incentives improve the experience during action pursuit, and therefore, this shift is unique to intrinsic incentives. Extrinsic incentives, by contrast, are valued similarly inside and outside pursuit.
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Mauro Giacomantonio, Femke Ten Velden & Carsten De Dreu
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
It is argued that depleted individuals are concerned with conserving energy and therefore prefer strategies framed as easy. When such easy strategies can be adopted, the concern with conserving energy is reduced, and subsequent task performance restored. Indeed, Experiment 1 showed that adopting a strategy framed as easy but suboptimal (vs. difficult but optimal) reduced the need to conserve energy, and this enabled depleted individuals to perform as well as non-depleted individuals. Experiment 2 showed that when an objectively optimal negotiation strategy was framed as easy (rather than difficult), depleted negotiators were more likely to adopt the strategy and therefore achieved better outcomes. We conclude that depleting executive functions leads to a preference for an easy strategy and that when framing strategies as easy, the need to conserve energy is alleviated and task performance is maintained.
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The Role of Performance Feedback on the Self-Efficacy-Performance Relationship
Stuart Beattie et al.
Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We report 3 studies that explore the moderating role of performance feedback on the within-person relationship between self-efficacy and performance. In Study 1, we provided participants with either very little feedback (current trial performance) or a wider range of previous performance markers (baseline performance and current trial performance) before making efficacy judgments. In Study 2, we refined the self-efficacy measure by providing participants with more detailed feedback regarding their past performance. In Study 3, we applied the methodology from Studies 1 and 2 to a task in which negative self-efficacy effects have been prevalent (i.e., golf putting). Results revealed that performance feedback moderated the self-efficacy-performance relationship. When we provided participants with minimal performance feedback, their self-efficacy was negatively related to subsequent performance; when we provided more detailed feedback, self-efficacy was positively related to subsequent performance. Studies 2 and 3 further confirmed these findings. Results across studies confirm that feedback is an important moderator of the self-efficacy-performance relationship, which can shed light on the equivocal findings to date.
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Stereotype Fit Effects for Golf Putting Nonexperts
Lisa Grimm et al.
Sport, Exercise, and Performance Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research has connected stereotype threat and regulatory fit by showing improved performance for individuals with negative stereotypes when they focused on minimizing potential losses. In the current study, non-Black participants, who were nonexperts at golf putting, were told that a golf putting task was diagnostic of natural athletic ability (i.e., negative stereotype) or sports intelligence (i.e., positive stereotype). Participants tried to maximize earned points or minimize lost points assigned after every putt, which was calculated based on the distance to a target. Results showed better performance for participants experiencing a fit between their global task stereotype and the task goal, and that regulatory fit allowed for increased attention on the strategies beneficial for task performance. Interestingly, we found that performance of individuals high in working memory capacity suffered greatly when those individuals experienced a regulatory mismatch.
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On Rivalry and Goal Pursuit: Shared Competitive History, Legacy Concerns, and Strategy Selection
Benjamin Converse & David Reinhard
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Seven studies converge to show that prompting people to think about a rival versus a nonrival competitor causes them to view current competitions as more connected to past ones, to be more concerned with long-term legacy, and to pursue personal goals in a more eager, less cautious manner. These results are consistent with a social-cognitive view of rivalry that defines it as a competitive relational schema. A preliminary analysis revealed that people were more likely to appeal to past competitions to explain the importance of current rivalry than nonrivalry contests. Experiment 1 showed that people view rivalry versus nonrivalry competitions as more embedded in an ongoing competitive narrative and that this perception increases legacy concerns. The next 2 experiments used a causal chain approach to examine the possibility of legacy concerns acting as a mediator between rivalry and eagerness. Experiment 2a demonstrated that longer (vs. shorter) competitive histories are associated with increased legacy concerns. Experiment 2b manipulated legacy concerns and found that this shifted regulatory focus toward eagerness. Finally, 3 experiments tested the direct effect of thinking about a rival on eager strategy selection: Thinking about rivals (vs. nonrivals) led people to be more interested in offensive than defensive strategies (Experiment 3), to initiate rather than delay their goal pursuit (Experiment 4), and to rely on spontaneous rather than deliberative reasoning (Experiment 5). We suggest that rivalries affect how people view their goals and the strategies they use for pursuing them, and that these effects are at least partially attributable to the shared history between individuals and their rivals.
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Receipt of reward leads to altered estimation of effort
Arezoo Pooresmaeili, Aurel Wannig & Raymond Dolan
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 27 October 2015, Pages 13407-13410
Abstract:
Effort and reward jointly shape many human decisions. Errors in predicting the required effort needed for a task can lead to suboptimal behavior. Here, we show that effort estimations can be biased when retrospectively reestimated following receipt of a rewarding outcome. These biases depend on the contingency between reward and task difficulty and are stronger for highly contingent rewards. Strikingly, the observed pattern accords with predictions from Bayesian cue integration, indicating humans deploy an adaptive and rational strategy to deal with inconsistencies between the efforts they expend and the ensuing rewards.