The Influence of Social Comparison on Visual Representation of One's Face

Can the effects of social comparison extend beyond explicit evaluation to visual self-representation—a perceptual stimulus that is objectively verifiable, unambiguous, and frequently updated? We morphed images of participants' faces with attractive and unattractive references. With access to a mirror, participants selected the morphed image they perceived as depicting their face. Participants who engaged in upward comparison with relevant attractive targets selected a less attractive morph compared to participants exposed to control images (Study 1). After downward comparison with relevant unattractive targets compared to control images, participants selected a more attractive morph (Study 2). Biased representations were not the products of cognitive accessibility of beauty constructs; comparisons did not influence representations of strangers' faces (Study 3). We discuss implications for vision, social comparison, and body image

Motivated Visual Perception: How We See What We Want To See

In 2001, a U.S. nuclear submarine surfaced underneath a Japanese fishing vessel, causing it to sink-9 died. In 1999, 41 bullets fired by 4 New York police officers hit and killed Amidou Diallo, who pulled from his pocket a wallet rather than what the police thought was a gun. In both tragedies, one might ask how these central actors could have failed to see what was plainly visible. With this work, I ask how perceptual systems represent the surrounding world if not in a veridical manner. I propose that the perceptual representations of which perceivers are consciously aware are colored by nonconscious motivational forces. Motivations, including wishes, dissonance reduction, and visceral needs, bias visual perception. Three streams of research examined the ways in which motivations constrain perceptual processing. The first stream demonstrated that people's wishes biased the resolution of visual ambiguity. In 5 studies, participants shown an ambiguous visual figure reported seeing the desired interpretation. This finding was affirmed by unobtrusive and implicit measures of perception including eyetracking, lexical decision response times, and experimental manipulations. In the second stream, I explored whether the motivation to reduce cognitive dissonance biased perception and assisted in the regulation of psychological states. In 2 studies, participants performed an aversive task under high or low choice conditions. Participants saw components of their environment in less extreme ways in order to reduce dissonance. Those experiencing high choice perceived distances to travel as shorter and slopes to climb as shallower. In the third stream, 5 studies showed that desires such as hunger, thirst, and general preferences led to a narrowed focus of attention on a desired object. Narrowly focusing attention reduced estimates of distance. Participants saw desired objects as closer than less desired objects. I end by discussing the implications for marketing, self-screening in early cancer detection and relationship satisfaction among other applied domains. This work explores the limits of motivations, testing whether they cross the boundary separating how people think about their world and how they see it.The research in Chapters 2, 3, and 4 was supported financially by National Institute of Mental Health Grant RO1 56072, awarded to David Dunning

Concrete messages increase healthy eating preferences

Public health campaigns utilize messaging to encourage healthy eating. The present experimental study investigated the impact of three components of health messages on preferences for healthy foods. We exposed 1676 online, American study participants to messages that described the gains associated with eating healthy foods or the costs associated with not eating healthy foods. Messages also manipulated the degree to which they included abstract and concrete language and the temporal distance to foreshadowed outcomes. Analysis of variance statistical tests indicated that concrete rather than abstract language increased the frequency of choosing healthy over unhealthy foods when indicating food preferences. However, manipulations of proximity to outcomes and gain rather than loss frame did not affect food preferences. We discuss implications for effective public health campaigns, and economic and social cognitive theories of persuasion, and our data suggest that describing health outcomes in concrete rather than abstract terms may motivate healthier choices