Different selves have different effects: Self-activation and defensive social comparison

Abstract

Different selves have different effectsSchwinghammer, S.A.; Stapel, D.A.; Blanton, H. General rightsCopyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the public portal are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights.-Users may download and print one copy of any publication from the public portal for the purpose of private study or research -You may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain -You may freely distribute the URL identifying the publication in the public portal Take down policy If you believe that this document breaches copyright, please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim.

Motivated dimension manipulation in the processing of social comparison information

“…Individuals can have a number of motivations for seeking and processing self-relevant information (Sedikides & Strube, 1995;Taylor, Neter, & Wayment, 1995) and both the information-processing motive and the type of self-conception that is active in a particular situation will influence how social comparison information is processed (Schwinghammer, Stapel, & Blanton, 2006;Stapel & Schwinghammer, 2004). Our results strongly suggest that self-enhancement concerns are associated with stretching and shrinking.…”

Looking through the eyes of the powerful

“…We expect this to be the case based on an analogous set of research that aims to answer the question whether the valence of stereotypes change when people stereotype to satisfy different goals (Van den Bos & Stapel, 2008). This research departs from the observation that stereotypes can serve multiple goals, most notably self-enhancement (Fein & Spencer, 1997;Schwinghammer, Stapel, & Blanton, 2006;Tesser, 1988) and comprehension goals (Fiske & Taylor, 1991;Macrae & Bodenhausen, 2000;Strack, 2004 …”

Leader—Follower Effects in Resource Dilemmas: The Roles of Leadership Selection and Social Responsibility

“…In the neutral condition, we also asked participants to actively describe a neutral concept, as we wanted to avoid the case that the difference between the social responsibility condition and the neutral condition could also be explained by having asked participants to do something in the former condition and to do nothing in the latter condition. Therefore, we used a task that has been shown to elicit neutral thoughts and affect; that is, we asked participants to describe the qualities of a chair (taken from Schwinghammer, Stapel, & Blanton, 2006). In this condition, the difference in allocations between elected and appointed leaders (as demonstrated in Experiment 2) is expected to emerge.…”

“…This fi ller task constituted the priming procedure aimed at making accessible the concept of social responsibility or the concept of a chair (= neutral condition; cf. Schwinghammer et al, 2006). More precisely, participants wrote down either a description of the concept social responsibility or a description of a chair.…”