Clayton R. Critcher

When Self-Affirmations Reduce Defensiveness: Timing Is Key

Research on self-affirmation has shown that simple reminders of self-integrity reduce people’s tendency to respond defensively to threat. Recent research has suggested it is irrelevant whether the self-affirmation exercise takes place before or after the threat or the individual’s defensive response to it, supposedly because the meaning of threats is continuously reprocessed. However, four experiments revealed that affirmations may be effective only when introduced prior to the initiation of a defensive response. Affirmations introduced before threatening feedback reduced defensive responding; affirming after a threat was effective in reducing defensiveness only if the defensive conclusion had yet to be reached. Even though threats may activate a defensive motivation, the authors’ results suggest that defensive responses may not be spontaneous and may be prompted only when suggested by the dependent measures themselves. This explains why some affirmations positioned after threats are effective in reducing defensiveness. Implications for self-affirmation theory are discussed.

How Quick Decisions Illuminate Moral Character

It has been suggested that people attend to others’ actions in the service of forming impressions of their underlying dispositions. If so, it follows that in considering others’ morally relevant actions, social perceivers should be responsive to accompanying cues that help illuminate actors’ underlying moral character. This article examines one relevant cue that can characterize any decision process: the speed with which the decision is made. Two experiments show that actors who make an immoral decision quickly (vs. slowly) are evaluated more negatively. In contrast, actors who arrive at a moral decision quickly (vs. slowly) receive particularly positive moral character evaluations. Quick decisions carry this signal value because they are assumed to reflect certainty in the decision (Experiments 1 and 2), which in turn signals that more unambiguous motives drove the behavior (Experiment 2), which in turn explains the more polarized moral character evaluations. Implications for moral psychology and the law are discussed.

How Chronic Self-Views Influence (and Mislead) Self-Assessments of Task Performance: Self-Views Shape Bottom-Up Experiences With the Task

Self-assessments of task performance can draw on both top-down sources of information (preconceived notions about ones ability at the task) and bottom-up cues (ones concrete experience with the task itself). Past research has suggested that top-down self-views can mislead performance evaluations but has yet to specify the exact psychological mechanisms that produce this influence. Across 4 experiments, the authors tested the hypothesis that self-views influence performance evaluations by first shaping perceptions of bottom-up experiences with the task, which in turn inform performance evaluations. Consistent with this hypothesis, a relevant top-down belief influenced performance estimates only when learned of before, but not after, completing a task (Study 1), and measures of bottom-up experience were found to mediate the link between top-down beliefs about ones abilities and performance evaluations (Studies 2-4). Furthermore, perception of an objectively definable bottom-up cue (i.e., time it takes to solve a problem) was better predicted by a relevant self-view than the actual passage of time.

Self-Affirmations Provide a Broader Perspective on Self-Threat

We present an “affirmation as perspective” model of how self-affirmations alleviate threat and defensiveness. Self-threats dominate the working self-concept, leading to a constricted self disproportionately influenced by the threat. Self-affirmations expand the size of the working self-concept, offering a broader perspective in which the threat appears more narrow and self-worth realigns with broader dispositional self-views (Experiment 1). Self-affirmed participants, relative to those not affirmed, indicated that threatened self-aspects were less all-defining of the self (although just as important), and this broader perspective on the threat mediated self-affirmation’s reduction of defensiveness (Experiment 2). Finally, having participants complete a simple perspective exercise, which offered a broader perspective on the self without prompting affirmational thinking (Experiment 3a), reduced defensiveness in a manner equivalent to and redundant with a standard self-affirmation manipulation (Experiment 3b). The present model offers a unifying account for a wide variety of seemingly unrelated findings and mysteries in the self-affirmation literature.

The cost of keeping it hidden: decomposing concealment reveals what makes it depleting.

People possess information or identities that it sometimes behooves them to conceal, but at what cost? Participants who were instructed to conceal information during a short interview--either their sexual orientation (Studies 1-3) or specified words (Study 4)--showed evidence of self-regulatory depletion. Concealment led to deficits in intellectual acuity, interpersonal restraint, physical stamina, and executive function. We decomposed depletion into 2 component processes that, together or separately, might contribute to the observed depletion. When actively concealing information, one must monitor for specific content to inhibit. If taboo content is detected, one must modify or alter ones speech from what one would have said otherwise. Concealment produced depletion even when there was no need to actually alter ones speech (Studies 2 and 4), demonstrating that monitoring ones speech for content to conceal was sufficient to cause depletion. In contrast, having to alter ones speech without having to monitor for specific content to inhibit--either by adding false content (Study 3) or inserting specific words into ones speech stream (Study 4)--did not lead to measurable depletion. In this way, the studies are the first to assess which part of an act of self-regulation--monitoring for specific behavior to override or the actual altering of that behavior--is responsible for observed depletion. Furthermore, the research suggests that social environments that explicitly or implicitly encourage identity concealment may prevent people from performing optimally.

Egocentric pattern projection: how implicit personality theories recapitulate the geography of the self.

Five studies demonstrated egocentric pattern projection, in that the implicit personality theories (IPTs) that participants held about other people tended to recapitulate the terrain of their own personality. To the extent that participants believed they possessed 2 traits to a similar degree within themselves, they tended, through their judgments of others and estimates of population parameters, to claim that the 2 traits were positively correlated in other people; and if they believed they possessed 2 traits to a dissimilar degree within themselves, they tended to claim that the 2 traits were negatively correlated in other people. Further evidence showed that information about the self plays a causal role in the construction of implicit theories, making a unique contribution to the shape of IPTs over and above that of information about another person. The relevance of these data for recent controversies over egocentric social judgment is discussed.

Inferring Attitudes From Mindwandering

Self-perception theory posits that people understand their own attitudes and preferences much as they understand others’, by interpreting the meaning of their behavior in light of the context in which it occurs. Four studies tested whether people also rely on unobservable “behavior,” their mindwandering, when making such inferences. It is proposed here that people rely on the content of their mindwandering to decide whether it reflects boredom with an ongoing task or a reverie’s irresistible pull. Having the mind wander to positive events, to concurrent as opposed to past activities, and to many events rather than just one tends to be attributed to boredom and therefore leads to perceived dissatisfaction with an ongoing task. Participants appeared to rely spontaneously on the content of their wandering minds as a cue to their attitudes, but not when an alternative cause for their mindwandering was made salient.

The Involuntary Excluder Effect: Those Included by an Excluder Are Seen as Exclusive Themselves

People are highly vigilant for and alarmed by social exclusion. Previous research has focused largely on the emotional and motivational consequences of being unambiguously excluded by others. The present research instead examines how people make sense of a more ambiguous dynamic, 1-person exclusion--situations in which one person (the excluder) excludes someone (the rejected) while including someone else (the included). Using different methodological paradigms, converging outcome measures, and complementary comparison standards, 5 studies present evidence of an involuntary excluder effect: Social perceivers are quick to see included persons as though they are excluders themselves. Included individuals are seen as belonging to an exclusive alliance with the excluder, as liking the excluder more than the rejected, and as likely to perpetuate future exclusion against the rejected. Behavioral evidence reinforced these findings: The included was approached with caution and suspicion. Notably, such perceptions of the included as an excluder were drawn by the rejected themselves and outside observers alike, did not reflect the attitudes and intentions of included persons or those who simulated 1-person exclusion from the vantage point of the included, applied specifically to the included (but not someone who simply witnessed the rejecteds rejection), and arose as a consequence of intentional acts of exclusion (and thus, not just because 2 individuals shared an exclusive experience). Consistencies with and contributions to literatures on balance theory, minimal groups, group entitativity, and the ostracism detection system literatures are discussed.

Whether I like it or not, it's important: Implicit importance of means predicts self-regulatory persistence and success.

To effectively self-regulate, people must persevere on tasks that they deem important, regardless of whether those tasks are enjoyable. Building on past work that has noted the fundamental role of implicit cognition in guiding effective self-regulation, the present paper tests whether an implicit association between goal means and importance predicts self-regulatory persistence and success. Implicit importance predicted markers of effective self-regulation-better grades, more studying and exercise, and stronger standardized testing performance-over and above, and often better than, explicit beliefs about the importance of that self-regulation, as well as implicit evaluations of those means. In particular, those for whom tasks were fairly taxing to complete (i.e., those for whom this self-regulation required effortful self-control) were those who most benefitted from the implicit association between means and importance. Moreover, when participants were reminded of recent self-regulatory failure that they believed could be overcome through hard work, implicit importance toward the means increased as if to prepare them to achieve self-regulatory persistence. A final study sought to reconcile the present findings with previous work showing the key role that implicit evaluations play in effective self-regulation. We reasoned that means are important precisely because they are associated with valued end-states. Consistent with this account, implicit evaluations of end-states predicted the implicit importance of means, which in turn predicted effective self-regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record

Decomposing Forecasting The Salience-Assessment-Weighting (SAW) Model

The act of forecasting one’s behavior or performance is both commonplace and consequential, but it is also difficult. Previous research has identified a host of systematic forecasting errors. We suggest that existing findings can be better synthesized, and future research can proceed in a less piecemeal fashion, through the introduction of a general model that describes how forecasts unfold. In our salience-assessment-weighting (SAW) model, we outline three steps that describe how people translate information at their disposal into an accurate forecast of a future outcome. Dimensions potentially relevant to the outcome become salient; one’s standing on that dimension must be accurately assessed; and one must appropriately weight the importance of that dimension to translate it into a forecast. We illustrate how this SAW model is helpful in unifying previous research findings, identifying how and when forecasts go astray, and suggesting questions for future research.