Lecture 20: Self III

Question 1

what is the self-evaluation maintenance model

Answer 1

Tesser
- can see through personal relationships
when someone outperforms us, we can respond by:
- basking in reflected glory= birging= protecting yourself by (making yourself feel better) with associating yourself with your partner= seen as a team
- when being socially compared= look bad in comparison

Question 2

what determines responses to being outperformed?

Answer 2

closeness
- you can’t birg with stranger= because hard to associate yourself to someone you don’t know
- BUT: festinger= you’re more likely to compare yourself to someone who is close to you
self-relevance
- if person is close + domain is relevant= social comparison
- in person is close + domain isn’t relevant= BIRG– you don’t really care, so you associate yourself with them

Question 3

how to maintain + self evaluation

Answer 3

• reduce closeness to that person– stop spending time with her– “shes to competitive”
• reduce relevance (sour grapes effect)– “cricket is more important than golf”
• reduce performance gap– 1. work harder to be better than that person (can be motivating) 2. sabotage other person’s performance (easier)– ex. make them use a lighter bowling bowl

Question 4

sabotaging another person’s performance

Answer 4

Tesser
- 2 male friends in groups of 4
- password game– guess the password
- either given easy clues or hard clues
- manipulated relevance:
- high self-relevance: “to test your verbal skills”= make it seem like its important
- low self-relevance: “its just a dumb game”= make it seem less important
- each person in turn identified the password
- 1 member of each pair: received false feedback that they did not correctly identify it
- DV: wanted to see what kind of clues (easy or hard) they would give to their friend vs stranger
= depended on self-relevance:
- gave harder clues in high self-relevance condition than in the low self relevance condition
- this effect interacted with closeness
- low self-R– gave harder clues to strangers than to friends– wanna win as a team
- high self R– gave harder clues to friends– don’t want them to succeed because the task is relevant
- follow up study with F ps: replicated, but effects were weaker
- men= their interdependency focuses on identity to group
- female= interdependency focuses on close friends

Question 5

self-enhancement as…

Answer 5

defense

Question 6

when you’re self threatened=

Answer 6

self-enhancement

Question 7

whats the self-affirmation theory

Answer 7

Steele

• we’re motivated to protect the integrity of the self
• we wanna believe that we’re decent
• despite how shit we might be, the horrible things we have done= we wanna be good in the end
• we have a global self- integrity: relationships, roles, values, group identities, central beliefs, goals)
• if we are criticised about one of our domains= damages our self integrity= get defensive
• self-system= flexible= if 1 of our domains gets threatened, then we act by boosting another domain= try to protect self integrity

Question 8

how to test self-affirmation theory

Answer 8

• please rank order how importnat these values are to you: business, social life, religion, etc
• now write abt most important value and why
• vs. not affirmed condition: least important value
• threaten the self
• measure defensive responses

Question 9

self-affirmation experiment

Answer 9

Sherman
- field study with athletes (team sports)
- team; either won or lost
- self-affirmed or not self-affirmed
- estimated how much their team contributed to outcome of game
=
- no affirmation: winners= said that team contributed a lot; losers= said that team contributed less
- self-affirmation: W + L= same level– you think you contributed a lot, don’t say that group contributed a lot

Question 10

self-A + evaluative stress experiment

Answer 10

• you get stressed when event is threatening
• high stress when self being evaluated
• can self-A reduce evaluative stress?
• ps– self-affirmed or not
• did the Trier social stress task= say speech and counted backward by 13s in front of hostile audience
• measured salivary cortisol (20 mins, 30 mins, 45 mins after post-stress onset)
• self- A= less stress
• no affirmation= more stress

Question 11

what are the limits to self-affirmation

Answer 11

• culture might change effects of self-A
• who finds what threatening?
• who finds what affirming?
• affirmation in domains that are related to threat= less effective
• affirmation in moral domain= can backfire= moral licensing
  Moral licensing (Effron)
• vote for who?
• first picked obama over white candidate
• when asked: who would you pick to hire for police position?= you think: ah, i picked obama in the beginning so i didn’t show prejudice, so its ok to show prejudice the second time