John Sabini

The individual in a social world : essays and experiments

Part 1 The individual in the city the experience of living in cities the urban bystander on maintaining social norms response to intrusion into waiting lines the idea of a neighbourhood the familiar stranger a psychological map of New York City psychological map of Paris the vertical city. Part 2 The individual and authority: some conditions of obedience and disobedience to authority interpreting obedience ethical issues in the study of obedience subject reaction - the neglected factor in the ethics of experimentation disobedience in the Sixties. Part 3 The individual and the group: nationality and conformity conformity and Norwegian life ethics and the conformity experiment group pressure and acting against a person liberating effects of group pressure the drawing power of crowds of different style. Part 4 The individual in a communicative way: the small world problem the lost letter technique television and anti-social behaviour the image freezing machine candid camera reflections on news cyranoids.

Physical Attractiveness and Health in Western Societies: A Review.

Evidence from developed Western societies is reviewed for the claims that (a) physical attractiveness judgments are substantially based on body size and shape, symmetry, sex-typical hormonal markers, and other specific cues and (b) physical attractiveness and these cues substantially predict health. Among the cues that the authors review, only female waist-to-hip ratio and weight appear to predict both attractiveness and health in the claimed manner. Other posited cues--symmetry and sex-typical hormonal markers among them--failed to predict either attractiveness or health (or both) in either sex. The authors find that there is some indication that attractiveness has an overall relationship with health among women, but little indication that male attractiveness relates to male health.

How are Sociosexuality, Sex Drive, and Lifetime Number of Sexual Partners Related?

In two studies (ns = 277 and 221), the authors examined the relationships among sex drive, sociosexuality, lifetime number of sex partners, and gender identity. They found that sex drive is highly and positively correlated with sociosexual orientation, and that both sex drive and sociosexual orientation are positively correlated with lifetime number of sex partners. However, partial correlations revealed that sociosexual orientation is an independent predictor of lifetime number of sex partners, whereas sex drive is not. The authors were also able to replicate and extend Mikach and Bailey’s (1999) finding that gender identity is related to women’s lifetime number of sex partners. More masculine women had more sex partners and had a less restricted sociosexual orientation than did less masculine women; less masculine men had a higher sex drive than did more masculine men. The findings are discussed with regard to theory and research on sex drive and sociosexuality.

Lack of Character? Situationism Critiqued*

Of late philosophers have begun to write about the implications of research in social and personality psychology for the study of ethics. The spirit of this movement is that ethics should be founded on a realistic conception of human nature and that social and personality psychology have important things to say about these matters. Examples of philosophers involved in this movement are, inter alia, and most prominently, Doris, Flanagan, Harman, and Vranas. On the psychologists’ side, Ross and Nisbett are the most prominent examples of those attempting to insure that the findings of psychology find their way into our conception of human nature. We want to sign up for this movement too. But we are afraid that these philosophers and psychologists have drawn wrong conclusions from psychological results. We believe the lesson to be learned is substantially narrower than the movement seems to believe.

Transportation Across Media: Repeated Exposure to Print and Film

“Transportation into a narrative world” is a state of immersion into a story (Green & Brock, 2000). Transportation entails imagery, emotional response, and attentional focus. Two studies investigated whether transportation was affected by the medium of story presentation, especially when the narrative was experienced for a second time (e.g., watching the movie version of a previously read story). Study 1 (N = 88) showed that people who read a novel before viewing the film version were more transported into the film compared to nonreaders. In Study 2 (N = 71) participants came to the lab on two separate occasions to either read a passage or watch a movie clip. Reading followed by watching provided the greatest transportation. Furthermore, high need for cognition individuals were more transported when reading, whereas low need for cognition individuals were more transported when watching a narrative.

Emotional Responses to Sexual and Emotional Infidelity: Constants and Differences Across Genders, Samples, and Methods

In three studies (total N = 619), the authors tested an evolutionary hypothesis: Men are more bothered by sexual than emotional infidelity, whereas the reverse is true of women. More diverse samples (in age) and measures than is typical were used. In Study 1, the authors found across gender, sample, and method that sexual infidelity was associated with anger and blame, but emotional infidelity was associated with hurt feelings. The evolutionary effect was replicated with undergraduates but not with the nonstudent sample. In Study 2, narrative scenarios were used; it was found that nonstudent men and women were more hurt and upset by emotional infidelity but were made angrier by sexual infidelity. In Study 3, using Likert-type scales, scenarios, and a nonstudent sample, it was found that both genders were more upset, hurt, and angrier about sexual than emotional transgressions when rating one kind without hearing the opposite type. The implications for how emotional responses evolved are discussed.

Target Article: "The Really Fundamental Attribution Error in Social Psychological Research"

We review the classic studies on social influence and the fundamental attribution error to determine (a) whether it is true that behavior of the sort observed in those studies is externally caused in the two senses of external causality used by attribution theorists, (b) whether laypeople have been shown to overestimate the extent to which behavior is internally caused in either of those two senses, and (c) whether there is a better way to characterize the errors people make. We conclude that (a) behavior in those studies has not been shown to be externally caused in the two senses used by attribution theorists, (b) people have not been shown to overestimate the extent to which behavior is internally caused in either of those two senses, (c) there is a different sense of internal versus external causality that better characterizes the errors people make, and (d) these literatures taken together suggest that Americans are far more disposed to preserve face and avoid embarrassment than most people had suspected.

Shame and Embarrassment Revisited

The authors report three studies guided by Sabini and Silver’s view of the shame-embarrassment distinction. In each study, participants reported the emotions they would feel in scenarios. In Studies 1 and 2, they found that people reported experiencing shame if a real flaw was exposed but reported embarrassment if an audience member would (reasonably) think such a flaw was exposed. In Study 3, the authors found that the unreasonable perceptions of a flaw by an audience led to reported anger. The data are consistent with the view that people refer to themselves as experiencing shame when they believe that a real flaw of their self has been revealed, they refer to themselves as experiencing embarrassment when they believe that others have reason to think a flaw has been revealed, and they refer to themselves as angry when they believe others unreasonably see them as flawed. The data are inconsistent with the view that embarrassment is tied to violations of conventions, whereas shame is tied to moral failings.

Something it Takes to be an Emotion: The Interesting Case of Disgust

We advance the thesis that emotions require abstract elicitors and flexible responses. Elements of our psychology that in other ways would qualify as an emotion are disqualified if all of their elicitors and responses are too concrete. Having advanced this thesis, we examine disgust. Disgust is an interesting case of a motivational pattern that seems too concrete on both ends to count as a real emotion. Notwithstanding, it is often included on lists of basic emotions (e.g., Ekman, 1992). We argue, however, that the theorists interested in promoting disgusts candidacy for the college of emotions have also argued that disgust is not as concrete as it looks. We suggest that they have done so in the face of the facts to advance disgusts candidacy, thus supporting our view.

In defense of shame: Shame in the context of guilt and embarrassment

We are interested in the relations among shame, guilt, and embarrassment and especially in how each relates to judgments of character. We start by analyzing the distinction between being and feeling guilty, and unearth the role of shame as a guilt feeling. We proceed to examine shame and guilt in relation to moral responsibility and to flaws of character. We address a recent psychological finding (Tangney, Wagner, Hill-Barlow, and Marshall, 1996; Tangney, Hill-Barlow, Wagner and Marshall, 1996) that shame is both destructive and in so far as it has a social function could be replaced by guilt. We reinterpret the guilt culture/shame culture distinction in terms of our way of distinguishing these emotions. Finally we examine embarrassment as distinct from shame and find the difference to lie not so much in the phenomenology of the participant as it is in context, and in which elements of the context the speaker describing the emotion wishes to stress. We conclude by defending shame despite its psychological troubles.