When Ignorance Is Bliss: Exploring Perspective Taking, Negative State Affect and Performance

Beersma, Bianca; Bechtoldt, Myriam N.; Schouten, Maartje E.

doi:10.1177/1046496418775829

Cited by 8 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 68 publications

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“…This indicates that perspective-taking is an important characteristic of in-group gossip (cf. Davis, 1983;Beersma et al, 2018;Righi & Takács, 2022).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gossip is distinct from other topics in spontaneous conversation

et al. 2022

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Gossip – talking about relevant others in their absence – is believed to constitute a large part of informal communication. The perception of the prevalence of gossip implies that it can be unambiguously identified and distinguished from other topics in spontaneous conversation. Its distinctiveness may be justified by multiple theoretical perspectives, including one that describes in-group gossip as an informal device for enforcing norms and punishing norm violators, and another that claims that gossip is used to release frustration and communicate envy. If the ultimate reason for gossip is to facilitate social bonding between the sender and the receiver, however, this would not differentiate gossip from other conversational topics that provide social enjoyment, such as entertainment and food. In a novel contribution, we explore the topics included in a corpus containing 550 hours of unfiltered spontaneous conversation and identify using LDA topic modeling whether some topics are unambiguously prominent in in-group gossip. The explorative approach is integrated with the manual annotation of instances of gossip across the entire corpus. We identified coherent topics of in-group gossip that are clearly different from those of small talk and storytelling. Our analysis finds that feelings, intentions, and opinions are frequently expressed in in-group gossip, more than habits, manners, and behavior. In-group gossip topics are characterized by more words associated with anger, in line with theoretical perspectives that attribute the motives of norm enhancement and punishment or frustration and envy to gossip.

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“…This indicates that perspective-taking is an important characteristic of in-group gossip (cf. Davis, 1983;Beersma et al, 2018;Righi & Takács, 2022).…”

Section: Resultsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gossip is distinct from other topics in spontaneous conversation

et al. 2022

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“…As one example, while several important emergent states such as cohesion, collective efficacy, task interdependence, transactive memory, and trust occupy key roles in our topic networks, terms such as “group affect,” “group mood,” and “affective tone” do not appear in our analyses. While three papers within the SGR corpus do address the phenomena of group affect, and incorporate the keywords “positive group affective tone” (Shin, 2014), “negative affect” and “positive affect” (Beersma et al, 2018), and “group mood” (Lehmann-Willenbrock et al, 2011) respectively, these individual mentions and lack of connection to other topics did not warrant these papers focus in our analyses, which reflects the overall lack of focus on group affect in the small group literature (Barsade & Knight, 2015).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping 50 Years of Small Group Research Through Small Group Research

Emich

Kumar

et al. 2020

Small Group Research

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At its 50-year milestone, we assess the Small Group Research ( SGR) corpus to reflect on the development of group research over the past half century. To do this, we examine the evolution of the corpus’s context and content. We examine its context by assessing its impact, which journals it communicates with, and the internationality of its authors. We examine its content—the topics discussed in its articles—using keyword clustering and co-occurrence network analysis. We identify 10 research communities and track their relationships over the four editorial periods associated with the SGR corpus (lagged 2 years for influence): 1970–1981, 1982–1991, 1992–2010, and 2011–2019. Our analyses indicate that the global and local study of group dynamics has fluctuated over time and that phenomenologically based topics connect theoretical topics and stimulate theoretical development. We also provide three criteria to identify communities and topics of group research most likely to benefit from future integration.

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“…The PDM focuses on cognitive strategies in social situations. Thus, social-cognitive variables such as cognitive flexibility, selfawareness, empathy, and perspective-taking may be fruitful avenues for research aimed at understanding responses to these situations [62][63][64][65][66]. We also recommend research examining PDM scores of physicians at different career stages and in different specialties.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%