Robert M. Arkin

I Am Too Just Like You Nonconscious Mimicry as an Automatic Behavioral Response to Social Exclusion

Research across various disciplines has demonstrated that social exclusion has devastating psychological, emotional, and behavioral consequences. Excluded individuals are therefore motivated to affiliate with others, even though they may not have the resources, cognitive or otherwise, to do so. The current research explored whether nonconscious mimicry of other individuals—a low-cost, low-risk, automatic behavior—might help excluded individuals address threatened belongingness needs. Experiment 1 demonstrated that excluded people mimic a subsequent interaction partner more than included people do. Experiment 2 showed that individuals excluded by an in-group selectively (and nonconsciously) mimic a confederate who is an in-group member more than a confederate who is an out-group member. The relationship between exclusion and mimicry suggests that there are automatic behaviors people can use to recover from the experience of being excluded. In addition, this research demonstrates that nonconscious mimicry is selective and sensitive to context.

Self-Monitoring Scale Factor Structure and Correlates

Factor analyses of Snyders Self-Monitoring Scale were conducted with two samples of introduction, psychology, students obtained during consecutive rears. Four factors replicated across years for both males and females: theatric al acting ability, sociability/social anxiety, other-directedness, and speaking ability. The correlations of these factors with several personality instruments were examined to aid in interpreting the factors. The findings indicated that this scale is not unidimensional, raising the possibility that some of its factors, notably sociability/social anxiety,, mat, interact differentially with characteristics of experimental situations.

Shyness and Self-Presentation

Research on self-presentation and impression management has grown immensely in scope and sophistication during the past two decades. Standing on the shoulders of such astute observers of social behavior as Erving Goffman (e.g., 1959) and Edward E. Jones (e.g., 1964), social psychologists have begun sampling the panorama of fascinating and theoretically compelling behaviors that fall into this category of social influence tactic; one can hardly scan a journal in social psychology without seeing some insightful account or intriguing demonstration of the ways people behave to create impressions on others. Moreover, theory has not lagged behind. Taxonomies, models, and analyses of the motivational bases of self-presentation have been offered (e.g., Arkin, 1981; Arkin & Baumgardner, 1985; Baumeister, 1982; Hogan, 1982; Jones & Pittman, 1982) and lengthy reviews of the process and collections of perspectives on the problem have come fast and furious as well (e.g., Schlenker, 1982; Tedeschi, 1981).

Subjective Overachievement: Individual Differences in Self-Doubt and Concern With Performance

We discuss the construct of doubt about ones competence and suggest that doubt can have myriad consequences (e.g., self-handicapping, defensive pessimism). We focus on the effect of self-doubt when it is combined with a concern with performance and assert that this combination leads to the phenomenon of subjective overachievement. In two studies, we present a new 17-item Subjective Overachievement Scale (SOS), which includes two independent subscales measuring individual differences in self-doubt and concern with performance. The first study, consisting of two large samples (Ns = 2,311 and 1,703), provides evidence that the scale has high internal consistency and a clear two-factor structure. Additionally, the subscales have adequate test-retest reliability (Ns = 67 and 115). A second study reveals that the SOS has good convergent and discriminant validity. Both subscales are unrelated to social desirability but exhibit the predicted patterns of associations with other related constructs. The Concern with Performance Subscale is correlated with achievement motivation, whereas the Self-Doubt Subscale is correlated with scales assessing negative affectivity (e.g., self-esteem, social anxiety) and other self-related strategies associated with concerns about ones competence (e.g., self-handicapping, defensive pessimism, impostor phenomenon). The SOS, which combines the two subscales, appears to tap a unique strategy that individuals may use to deal with doubts about their own competence.

Self-Handicapping The Moderating Roles of Public Self-Consciousness and Task Importance

A study was conducted to explore the role of individual differences in self-presentational concerns on a public form of self-handicapping. Male and female introductory psychology students, high and low in public self-consciousness, chose either facilitating or interfering music prior to taking a test described either as a valid predictor of academic success or as having unknown predictive ability. In addition, in an attempt to induce protective and acquisitive self-presentational styles, hay the subjects were given instructions that emphasized the likelihood of failure, while the remainder were given instructions that underscored the likelihood of success. Males handicapped more than females. High public self-conscious individuals handicapped more than their low public self-conscious counterparts, but only when they confronted a test characterized as valid. The success-versus failure-oriented instructions had no effect in the present study.

Determinants of Self-Handicapping Task Importance and the Effects of Preexisting Handicaps on Self-Generated Handicaps

In an effort to uncover some of the determinants of self-handicapping, male and female introductory psychology students chose to listen to either facilitating or interfering music prior to taking a test described either as a valid or an invalid predictor of academic success. In addition, half of the subjects were led to believe that a preexisting distracter, or handicap, was already present in the environment whereas the remainder were not. Results revealed that self-handicapping occurred in anticipation of an important task, but only when there was no preexisting handicap. Attributions for success and failure revealed a clear self-serving bias, replicating earlier work. The results are discussed in terms of the attributional and practical utility of convenient excuses versus self-generated self-handicaps.

Self-Doubt and Self-Esteem: A Threat from within

The impact on self-esteem of activating self-doubt was investigated in three studies. Individuals with enduring high self-doubt were expected to be more threatened by an experimental induction of self-doubt (modeled on the ease of retrieval paradigm) than individuals low in enduring self-doubt, and their self-esteem was predicted to decline. The predictions were supported when self-esteem was measured postexperimentally (Experiment 1) and when it was measured both pre- and postexperimentally (Experiment 2). There was no comparable loss in self-esteem for individuals low in self-doubt. A third experiment explored the phenomenology of low-self-doubt individuals and replicated the finding that their level of self-esteem was unaffected by the induction designed to produce doubt.

Affective state mediates causal attributions for success and failure

The influence of affect on causal attributions for success and failure was examined in this experiment. A positive, neurtral, or negative mood was induced in subjects who then learned they had either succeeded or failed an aptitude test taken previously. Relative to neutral mood control conditions, subjects in both positive and negative mood conditions showed a pronounced self-serving bias, particularly following success. The finding is interpreted as self-regulation of affective state. Specifically, causal attribution of success to internal factors can sustain or enhance positive affect; attribution of failure to external factors can diminish negative affect. Ancillary analyses corroborated this interpretation.

Behavioral other-enhancement: strategically obscuring the link between performance and evaluation

A strategy related to self-handicapping in which individuals supply a comparison other with a performance advantage rather than handicap their own performance was investigated in two experiments. In Experiment 1 greater other-enhancement was found among men than among women. In addition, men engaged in the most other-enhancement when expecting that their performance would be compared with that of a coparticipant. In Experiment 2 the hypothesis that subjects would facilitate their coparticipants performance primarily under conditions of uncertainty and competition was supported.

Self-Presentation and Self-Evaluation: Processes of Self-Control and Social Control

No topical area of social psychology has struggled with the issue of public versus private selves more than has the theoretical and empirical work in the area of self-presentation. The several other chapters in this book that deal expressly with self-presentation, or allude to the management of one’s public persona, attest to this. Indeed, it seems inevitable that interest in a class of behaviors characterized as self-presentational would lead to interest in how, and how well, what is inside the individual gets outside in the form of a social self. Further, whether private and public selves are parallel in content and process, and how they may interrelate, have become central questions in the impression management literature. These questions provided the impetus for this chapter.