The man who wasn't there:Subliminal social comparison standards influence self-evaluation

Life provides an endless stream of social comparison information. Because opportunities to compare with others are so abundant, social comparison theory traditionally assumes that people are selective in their comparison activities and primarily compare with deliberately selected standards. Recent research, however, demonstrates that social comparisons often occur spontaneously, even if no standard is explicitly provided or deliberately selected. We examined whether comparisons are so spontaneous that they are even engaged if people are fleetingly exposed to a potential standard-so fleetingly that they remain unaware of the standard. In three studies, participants were subliminally primed with moderate versus extreme, high versus low standards during self-evaluation. Results demonstrate that self-evaluations are influenced by subliminally presented standards. Specifically, self-evaluations are assimilated towards moderate standards and contrasted away from extreme standards. These self-evaluative consequences of subliminal standards, however, were only obtained if participants engaged in self-reflection during standard exposure. These findings emphasize that social comparisons are truly ubiquitous processes that are engaged even for fleeting exposure to standard information. (C) 2004 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.</p

A tool for thought! When comparative thinking reduces stereotyping effects

Stereotypes have pervasive, robust, and often unwanted effects on how people see and behave towards others. Undoing these effects has proven to be a daunting task. Two studies demonstrate that procedurally priming participants to engage in comparative thinking with a generalized focus on differences reduces behavioral and judgmental stereotyping effects. In Study 1, participants who were procedurally primed to focus on differences sat closer to a skinhead – a member of a negatively stereotyped group. In Study 2, participants primed on differences ascribed less gender stereotypic characteristics to a male and female target person. This suggests that comparative thinking with a focus on differences may be a simple cognitive tool to reduce the behavioral and judgmental effects of stereotyping

Beyond awareness and resources: evaluative conditioning may be sensitive to processing goals

"Evaluative conditioning (EC) is often regarded as an automatic affective learning process. Yet, recent empirical evidence suggests that EC may actually be sensitive to contingency awareness and to the availability of attentional resources. Here, we examine for the first time a third horseman of EC automaticity: processing goals. Specifically, we had participants engage an EC task after completing a task known to elicit the goal of processing either the perceptual similarities or the perceptual differences between stimuli. EC was predicted and found to be larger in the former (similarity-focus) than in the latter (difference-focus) condition. This finding provides original evidence that EC is sensitive to the processing goal activated in participants as they encode the CS–US pairings. The theoretical implications of this finding are discussed." [author's abstract

Should advertisers use skinny models?

The size of the models you show in advertising affects how consumers feel about themselves and your products. A woman’s body image is an important source of her self-esteem, yet approximately 50% of girls and young women report being dissatisfied with their bodies

The Order Effect in Self-Other Predictions: Considering Target as a Moderator

Two factors known to affect the use of self in social prediction, target similarity and order of predictions, are considered in concert to understand how the use of self varies across the prediction of different targets. Replicating earlier studies, we predicted and found that people use the self more when predicting similar others than when predicting dissimilar others. Extending existing studies, we predicted and found order effects for similar others. As predicted no order effects emerged for predictions for dissimilar targets. Because the self is more accessible during the prediction of similar others, it matters whether self‐predictions precede or follow other‐predictions. Feature‐matching theory is proposed as a possible explanation for the emergence of order effects in predictions of similar targets

Trust in everyday life

Although trust plays a pivotal role in many aspects of life, very little is known about the manifestation of trust and distrust in everyday life. In this work, we integrated several prior approaches to trust and investigated the prevalence and key determinants of trust (vs. distrust) in people’s natural environments, using preregistered experience-sampling methodology. Across more than 4,500 social interactions from a heterogeneous sample of 427 participants, results showed high average levels of trust, but also considerable variability in trust across contexts. This variability was attributable to aspects of trustee perception, social distance, as well as three key dimensions of situational interdependence: conflict of interests, information (un)certainty, and power imbalance. At the dispositional level, average everyday trust was shaped by general trust, moral identity, and zero-sum beliefs. The social scope of most trust-related traits, however, was moderated by social distance: Whereas moral identity buffered against distrusting distant targets, high general distrust and low social value orientation amplified trust differences between close vs. distant others. Furthermore, a laboratory-based trust game predicted everyday trust only with regard to more distant but not close interaction partners. Finally, everyday trust was linked to self-disclosure and to cooperation, particularly in situations of high conflict between interaction partners’ interests. We conclude that trust can be conceptualized as a relational hub that interconnects the social perception of the trustee, the relational closeness between trustor and trustee, key structural features of situational interdependence, and behavioral response options such as self-disclosure

So pretty! The neural correlates of self-other vs familiar-other attractiveness comparisons.

Previous research has demonstrated that comparing two persons activates a frontoparietal network associated with numbers and nonsocial magnitudes. However, it is unclear whether this network is also recruited by comparisons involving the self. Self-reflection engages self-serving motivations (e.g., the maintenance of a positive self-image) and is associated with specific brain structures, such as the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), the anterior insula (AI) and the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC). Self-other comparisons may thus rely on distinct neural activity. To clarify this question, we used fMRI and asked female participants to compare their own attractiveness (or the attractiveness of a familiar woman) to pictures of unknown women. Participants were slower for comparisons with targets whose attractiveness was similar to their own (or their familiar other). Yet although this behavioral result resembles the distance effect reported for nonsocial magnitudes, at the brain level, it was linked to the activity of the AI, the ACC and the MPFC. The effect of distance in these regions was stronger for self-other than familiar-other comparisons. We interpret these results in relation to previous literature in social psychology and social neuroscience