The role of egocentrism and focalism in the emotion intensity bias (original) (raw)
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The rational side of egocentrism in social comparisons
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2008
Prior work has found that when people compare themselves with others they egocentrically focus on their own strengths and contributions and pay less attention to strengths and contributions of the comparison group. As a consequence, individuals tend to overestimate their comparative standing when absolute standing is high and underestimate their comparative standing when absolute standing is low. The present research investigated a rational interpretation of this bias-namely, that people are egocentrically focused because they have more knowledge about themselves than about others. Support for this hypothesis was found in three studies, one concerning comparative judgments of responsibility and two others concerning confidence in competitions. These results suggest that there is a rational side to egocentrism in social comparisons.
Desirable responding triggered by affect: Automatic egotism?
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1987
Two experiments demonstrated an increase in socially desirable responding in the presence of affectladen stimuli. Subjects responded "me" or "not me" to trait adjectives presented on a microcomputer. Affect was manipulated by pairing each trait adjective with a distractor word presented nearby. Some distractors were affect-laden (e.g., sex, blood); others were innocuous (e.g., station, lake). In Study I, some trait adjectives were positive traits and others were neutral. Results showed that endorsements of positive traits were increased and speeded up by the affective distractors; denials of positive traits were reduced and slowed down by affective distractors. Both claims and denials of neutral traits were slowed by the affective distractors. In Study 2, positive, neutral, and negative traits were presented. The Study 1 results were replicated with parallel results for negative traits: Denials of negative traits were increased and speeded by the affective distractors, whereas claims of negative traits were reduced and slowed. This overall pattern of results was interpreted as a response-potentiation effect; that is, dominant responses were facilitated and subordinate responses were inhibited. Thus the net reaction to the presence of affective distractors was increased desirable responding. The high speed of this process suggests mediation by a fast-rising arousal or an attentional mechanism. The latter model suggests that self-perception automatically becomes more egotistical. This automatic egotism may underlie a variety of self-presentation phenomena, including certain defense mechanisms. Many social interactions involve the processing of social information (e.g., categorization, decision making) while under the influence of affective states (e.g., fear, love, anxiety, sexual arousal). Indeed, one might argue that all important social judgments involve some simultaneous processing of affect and cognition. Only recently, however, has much research been directed toward the interplay of affect and social cognition (for a review, seelsen, 1984). There is, of course, a classic literature on the effects of anxiety on task performance (Spence & Spence, 1966; Yerkes & Dodson, 1908). The anxiety effects appear to be a subset of the more general link between arousal and task performance (for a review, see Eysenck, 1982). The general finding is a response-potentiation effect; that is, arousal facilitates dominant responses and inhibits subordinate responses. For instance, Pallak, Pittman, Heller, and Munson (1975) found that when subjects were threatened with shock, a response-potentiation effect appeared on a subsequent Stroop task.
SSRN Electronic Journal, 2018
We document and investigate the egocentric impact bias-the perception that the social effects of the self's actions will be affectively stronger than if those same effects were brought about by others. In Study 1, participants thought pleasant or aversive videos would elicit stronger reactions when participants themselves (instead of the random determination of a computer) selected the video for others. In Study 2, participants who considered how to divide (vs. how a computer would randomly split) $10 with another thought the other would react particularly positively or negatively to the self's particularly generous or stingy allocations, respectively. The two studies found support for one of two possible mechanistic accounts. When the self was responsible for the selection, it experienced the stimuli as more affectively intense, thus explaining the bias. It was not the case that all intentional agents (e.g., another participant) were assumed to have more affective impact.
Interhemispheric interaction and egocentrism: The role of handedness in social comparative judgement
British Journal of Social …, 2010
Previous research has shown that people are egocentrically biased when making judgements that require a self-to-peer comparison -leading to above-/below-average effects and comparative optimism/pessimism. Two experiments examined whether interhemispheric brain connectivity (assessed via strength of handedness) is associated with egocentrism in the comparative judgement process. In Experiment 1, strong handers (SH) and mixed handers (MH) made percentile rank judgements about their abilities in easy and hard domains. In Experiment 2, SH and MH judged their likelihoods of outperforming a co-participant in easy and hard tasks. Both experiments showed that SH were more egocentric than MH and thus showed (a) more above-and below-average effects when estimating their abilities (Experiment 1) and (b) generally larger optimism biases when predicting performances in a competition (Experiment 2). Taken together, these experiments provide evidence that underlying interhemispheric connectivity shapes egocentrism in comparative judgement.
Objectivity in the Eye of the Beholder: Divergent Perceptions of Bias in Self Versus Others
Psychological Review, 2004
Important asymmetries between self-perception and social perception arise from the simple fact that other people's actions, judgments, and priorities sometimes differ from one's own. This leads people not only to make more dispositional inferences about others than about themselves (E. E. Jones & R. E. but also to see others as more susceptible to a host of cognitive and motivational biases. Although this blind spot regarding one's own biases may serve familiar self-enhancement motives, it is also a product of the phenomenological stance of naive realism. It is exacerbated, furthermore, by people's tendency to attach greater credence to their own introspections about potential influences on judgment and behavior than they attach to similar introspections by others. The authors review evidence, new and old, of this asymmetry and its underlying causes and discuss its relation to other psychological phenomena and to interpersonal and intergroup conflict.
Anxious and Egocentric: How Specific Emotions Influence Perspective Taking
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 2015
People frequently feel anxious. Although prior research has extensively studied how feeling anxious shapes intrapsychic aspects of cognition, much less is known about how anxiety affects interpersonal aspects of cognition. Here, we examine the influence of incidental experiences of anxiety on perceptual and conceptual forms of perspective taking. Compared with participants experiencing other negative, high-arousal emotions (i.e., anger or disgust) or neutral feelings, anxious participants displayed greater egocentrism in their mental-state reasoning: They were more likely to describe an object using their own spatial perspective, had more difficulty resisting egocentric interference when identifying an object from others' spatial perspectives, and relied more heavily on privileged knowledge when inferring others' beliefs. Using both experimental-causal-chain and measurement-of-mediation approaches, we found that these effects were explained, in part, by uncertainty appraisal tendencies. Further supporting the role of uncertainty, a positive emotion associated with uncertainty (i.e., surprise) produced increases in egocentrism that were similar to anxiety. Collectively, the results suggest that incidentally experiencing emotions associated with uncertainty increase reliance on one's own egocentric perspective when reasoning about the mental states of others.
Affective states influence emotion perception: evidence for emotional egocentricity
Psychological Research, 2020
Research in social cognition has shown that our own emotional experiences are an important source of information to understand what other people are feeling. The current study investigated whether individuals project their own affective states when reading other’s emotional expressions. We used brief autobiographical recall and audiovisual stimuli to induce happy, neutral and sad transient states. After each emotion induction, participants made emotion judgments about ambiguous faces displaying a mixture of happiness and sadness. Using an adaptive psychophysics procedure, we estimated the tendency to perceive the faces as happy under each of the induced affective states. Results demonstrate the occurrence of egocentric projections, such that faces were more likely judged as happy when participants reported being happy as compared to when they were sad. Moreover, the degree of emotional egocentricity was associated with individual differences in perspective-taking, with smaller biase...
Self-Interest Bias in Moral Judgments of Others' Actions
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2014
The automatic and affective nature of moral judgments leads to the expectation that these judgments are biased by an observer's own interests. Although the idea of self-interest bias is old, it has never been directly tested with respect to the moral judgments of other individuals' behaviors. The participants of three experiments observed other individuals' counternormative behavior (breaking a rule or cheating for gain), which was judged as immoral.