Identity Negotiation

"Identity Negotiation" refers to the process by which interacting people establish a shared understanding of their identities. Several of the experiments have striking and somewhat counter-intuitive results. They are all detailed in the paper:

Swann, W. B., Jr. (2005). The self and identity negotiation. Interaction Studies, 6, 69-83.

Seeking Self-Verifying Partners

For example, people who have a negative view of themselves tend to prefer interacting with a partner who also views them negatively. One might have expected that everyone would prefer interacting with someone who views them positively, but a large number of experiments from different labs and with varied experimental conditions seem to show that confirming one's self-assessments takes priority.

Interestingly, this effect disappears when subjects are unable to reflect on their self-assessments:

They had participants choose an interaction partner while unable to access their self-views because the experimenter rushed their decision or had them decide while rehearsing a phone number. Those with positive and negative self-views alike displayed a preference for a positive partner. Only when people had available the mental resources to compare the fit between their self-views and the partners’ evaluation did people with negative self-views display a preference for the negative evaluator.

Evoking Self-Verifying Reactions

When subjects interact with someone who doesn't share their self-understanding, they act in ways designed to evoke confirmations of their self-understanding. In other words, they act so as to change the views of their interaction partner to match their own.

Targets who thought of themselves as likeable elicited particularly favorable reactions when they thought perceivers disliked them, and targets who thought of themselves as dislikeable elicited particularly unfavorable reactions when they suspected that perceivers liked them. In short, targets were especially inclined to elicit self-confirmatory feedback from perceivers when they suspected that perceivers’ appraisals were incompatible with their self-views.

Terminating The Relationship

When subjects are involved in a long-term relationship with someone who doesn't share their self-view, they will tend to withdraw psychologically or even terminate the relationship.

Several studies of divorce rates verify they are highest in couples that differ in their understanding of one or both members. Similarly for the stability of room-mate relationships in the first year of college. One of the more interesting studies focused on how people with a low self-image would respond to jobs with increasing wages.

[We] measured the self-esteem of 7758 male and female college students using Tafarodi and Swann’s (1995) self-esteem measure.....obtained employment information for participants between 1994 and 1999. This allowed us to determine how much each participant earned from any given employer in any given calendar quarter.....

The results showed that self-esteem and wage trend began to interactively predict turnover afer 24 months of employment. Most strikingly, those with low self-esteem preferred remaining in jobs in which they received no raises and preferred leaving jobs with increasing wage. In contrast, those with high self-esteem were more apt to remain with the original employer if their wages increased. Apparently, when faced with a choice between their negative self-views or high salaries, people with low social worth chose to retain their negative self-views.

They hypothesized that prior to 24-months, the subjects didn't deem their employers well-informed judges and so were able to overlook the fact that employer evaluations conflicted with their own self-assessments. This effect is also present in dating studies in which people with negative self-image prefer dates who view them positively. After a sufficient number of dates, self-confirmation behaviors become more intense, presumably because the subjects feel that their dates should have had enough time to really know them.

Value In Diversity Effect

The so-called "value in diversity" hypothesis is that more diverse groups will perform better because they have a more diverse set of resources to draw from. While support for this hypothesis has been mixed, self-verification effects influence the effects of diversity on group performance.

...they found that self-verification achieved within the first ten minutes of interaction moderated the impact of demographic diversity on performance. Specifically, among groups that achieved high levels of self-verification, diversity facilitated performance. In contrast, among groups that failed to achieve substantial self-verification, diversity undermined performance. Thus, group members who quickly recognized the unique qualities of their fellow group members were optimally positioned to capitalize on the diversity in their group.

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Here is a short list of experimental studies in this area:

Swann, W. B., Jr., Stein-Seroussi, A. & Giesler, B. (1992). Why people self-verify. Journal of

Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 392–401.

Burke, P. J., & Stets, J. E. (1999). Trust and commitment through self-verification. Social Psy-

chology Quarterly, 62, 347–360.

Curtis, R. C., & Miller, K. (1986). Believing another likes or dislikes you: Behavior making

the beliefs come true. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 284–290

De La Ronde, C., & Swann, W. B., Jr. (1998). Partner verification: Restoring shattered images

of our intimates. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 75, 374–382.

Giesler, R. B., Josephs, R. A., & Swann, W. B., Jr. (1996). Self-verification in clinical depression:

Te desire for negative evaluation. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 105, 358–368.

Hogg, M. A., & Hardie, E. A. (1991). Social attraction, personal attraction, and self categori-

zation: A field study. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 17, 175–180.

Jones, S. C., & Panitch, D. (1971). Te self-fulfilling prophecy and interpersonal attraction.

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 7, 356–366.

Katz, J., Beach, S. R. H, & Anderson, P. (1996). Self-enhancement versus self-verification:

Does spousal support always help? Cognitive Terapy and Research, 20, 345–360.

Kelley, H. H., & Stahelski, A. J. (1970). Te social interaction basis of cooperators’ and com-

petitors’ beliefs about others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 16, 66–91.

McNulty, S. E., & Swann, W. B., Jr. (1994). Identity negotiation in roommate relationships:

Te self as architect and consequence of social reality. Journal of Personality and Social

Psychology, 67, 1012–1023.

Pelham, B. W., & Swann, W. B., Jr. (1994). Te juncture of intrapersonal and interpersonal

knowledge: Self-certainty and interpersonal congruence. Personality and Social Psy-

chology Bulletin, 20, 349–357.

Polzer, J. T., Milton, L. P. & Swann, W. B., Jr. (2002). Capitalizing on Diversity: Interpersonal

Congruence in Small Work Groups. Administrative Science Quarterly, 47, 296–324.

Ritts, V., & Stein, J. R. (1995). Verification and commitment in marital relationships: An

exploration of self-verification theory in community college students. Psychological Re-

ports, 76, 383–386.

Robinson, D. T., & Smith-Lovin, L. (1992). Selective interaction as a strategy for identity

maintenance: An affect control model. Social Psychology Quarterly, 55, 12–28.

Schafer, R. B., Wickrama, K. A. S., & Keith, P. M. (1996). Self-concept disconfirmation, psycho-

logical distress, and marital happiness. Journal of Marriage and the Family, 58, 167–177

Snyder, M. (1984). When belief creates reality. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimen-

tal social psychology (Vol. 16, pp. 248–305). New York: Academic Press.

Snyder, M., & Klein, O. (Tis volume). Construing and constructing others: On the reality

and generality of the behavioral confirmation scenario.

Swann, W. B., Jr. & Pelham, B. W. (2002). Who wants out when the going gets good? Psycho-

logical investment and preference for self-verifying college roommates. Journal of Self

and Identity, 1, 219–233.

Swann, W. B., Jr., De La Ronde, C., & Hixon, J. G. (1994). Authenticity and positivity strivings

in marriage and courtship. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66, 857–869.

Swann, W. B., Jr., Hixon, J. G., Stein-Seroussi, A., & Gilbert, D. T. (1990). Te fleeting gleam

of praise: Behavioral reactions to self-relevant feedback. Journal of Personality and So-

cial Psychology, 59, 17–26.

Swann, W. B., Jr., Milton, L. P., & Polzer, J. T. (2000). Should we create a niche or fall in line?

Identity negotiation and small group effectiveness. Journal of Personality and Social

Psychology, 79, 238–250.

Swann, W. B., Jr., Pelham, B. W., & Chidester, T. (1988). Change through paradox: Using self-

verification to alter beliefs. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 268–273.

Swann, W. B., Jr., Pelham, B. W., & Krull, D. S. (1989). Agreeable fancy or disagreeable truth?

Reconciling self-enhancement and self-verification. Journal of Personality and Social

Psychology, 57, 782–791.

Swann, W. B., Jr., Stein-Seroussi, A. & Giesler, B. (1992). Why people self-verify. Journal of

Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 392–401.

Swann, W. B., Jr., Wenzlaff, R. M., & Tafarodi, R. W. (1992). Depression and the search for

negative evaluations: More evidence of the role of self-verification strivings. Journal of

Abnormal Psychology, 101, 314–371.

Swann, W. B., Jr., & Ely, R. J. (1984). A battle of wills: Self-verification versus behavioral con-

firmation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46, 1287–1302.

Swann, W. B., Jr., & Hill, C. A. (1982). When our identities are mistaken: Reaffirming self-

conceptions through social interaction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology,

43, 59–66.

Swann, W. B., Jr., & Read, S. J. (1981). Self-verification processes: How we sustain our self-

conceptions. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 17, 351–372.

Swann, W. B., Jr., Rentfrow, P. J., & Guinn, J. (2002). Self-verification: Te search for coher-

ence. In M. Leary and J. Tagney, Handbook of self and identity (pp. 367–383). Guilford:

New York.

How your situation influences your goodness

How environmental features influence our behavior is, of course, a huge topic; but here are three particularly interesting experiments. The upshot is that how helpful people will be to strangers varies widely with seemingly minor events.

1: Mathews and Canon (1975: 574-5) found subjects were five times more likely to help an apparently injured man who had dropped some books when ambient noise was at normal levels than when a power lawnmower was running nearby (80 per cent v. 15 per cent).

2: Darley and Batson (1973: 105) report that passers-by not in a hurry were six times more likely to help an unfortunate who appeared to be in significant distress than were passers-by in a hurry (63 per cent v. 10 per cent).

3: Isen and Levin (1972: 387) discovered that people who had just found a dime were twenty-two times more likely to help a woman who had dropped some papers than those who did not find a dime (88 per cent v. 4 per cent).

Kind of makes you want to leave dimes for people to find, doesn't it? Actually, my favorite thing to do is to tuck a dollar bill behind some napkins in restaurant napkin dispensers.

To these studies I would also like to add my own anecdotal report. Several years ago I remember the news reporting that a homeless woman was giving birth in the stairway of the Downtown Berkeley BART station as hundreds of commuters passed without stopping (until an Oakland school teacher stopped to help get her to a nearby hospital). Why did no one stop? Probably some combination of being habituated to ignore those who appear homeless, being in a hurry, and the social distance they perceived between the woman and themselves.

Failing to help someone in acute distress (when doing so would be easy for you) is often presented as the paradigm of immorality; for example, simply walking past a child drowning in a shallow pond. Yet clearly many factors influence whether or not people will act.

The three studies were published in:

Mathews, K. E., and Cannon, L. K. (1975). ‘Environmental Noise Level as a Determinant of
Helping Behavior’ . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 32: 571-7

Isen, A. M., and Levin, P. F. (1972). ‘Effect of Feeling Good on Helping: Cookies and
Kindness’ . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 21:384-8

Darley, J. M., and Batson, C. D. (1973). ‘From Jerusalem to Jericho: A Study of Situational and Dispositional Variables in Helping Behavior’ . Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 27:100-8.

I found all three in an interesting book chapter (though I'm not sure what book as I found it online):

Doris, J. M., and Stich, S. P.. 'As A Matter of Fact: Emperical Perspectives on Ethics'

How stereotypes are maintained in communication

In they saying-is-believing post, I said that people tend to adjust their messages to fit their expectations of their audiences' expectations. What if a speaker doesn't know anything specific about their audience? They will tend to adjust their messages to fit general stereotypes.

Consider the following experiment:

Subjects re-tell a story involving a member of a stereotyped group in a 4-person "telephone" chain of story-tellers in which each has no information about the other participants. Because they lack information about their audience, they can't tune their message to a specific audience, but tuning occurs nonetheless. In the experiment, stereotype relevant information becomes more consistent over the communication chain, while stereotype non-relevant information becomes weaker.

The experiment in full is reported in:

Lyons & Kashima 2003. How are stereotypes maintained through communication? The influence of stereotype sharedness. J. Personal Soc. Psychol. 85:989-1005

The "Saying is Believing" Effect

In psychology, the saying-is-believing effect says that we tend to remember and believe what we say to other people, even if we told them what we thought they wanted to hear (instead of the full truth about what we really think). If we adjust our message to fit our audience, and then remember that version as the truth about something, it's no wonder that there can be such strong agreement between people who interact with each other a lot, and such deep, divisive, disagreement between those who rarely interact. Just think about the "conservative" and "liberal" ways of looking at the world!

Here are a few experiments in support of the saying-is-believing effect:

In an experiment by Higgins (1992) (replicated many times, as reviewed by Echterhoff et al. 2005), subjects are given behavioral descriptions of someone and told to describe this person to an audience so that the audience would be able to identify him. Subjects are told the audience is familiar with this person already, and, in different experimental conditions, that they either like or dislike the person.

The results are that subjects tended to tailor their descriptions of people to fit their perception of their audiences' expectations. Furthermore, their subsequent memories of the person described were more consistent with their audience-tuned message than the original description they were given.

This effect disappears, however, when they are led to believe the audience didn't identify the person on the basis of their tailored description. The message-tuning remains, but the saying-is-believing effect also disappears when the audience is an "out" group rather than an "in" group.

The common factor that seems to modulate the saying-is-believing effect is a sense of epistemic trust in the audience; The speaker has to trust the knowledge-forming credentials of their audience.

There is an especially interesting case of this for the acculturation of new immigrants. An experiment by Kosic et al. (2004) shows that, if immigrants are positively disposed toward their initial reference group of the new culture, they will tend to acculturate in proportion with their need for epistemic certainty in their beliefs (that is, for their need to have their own beliefs confirmed by people they trust). Otherwise, they will resist acculturation proportional to this need.

Here are references to the experiments:

Higgins ET. 1992. Achieving "shared reality" in the communication game: a social action that creates meaning. J. Lang. Soc. Psychology. 11:107-31

Echterhoff G, Higgins ET, Grolls S. 2005. Audience-tuning effects on memory: the role of shared reality. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 89:257-79

Kosic A, Kruglanksi AW, Pierro A, Mannetti L. 2004. Social cognition of immigrants' acculturation: effects of the need for closure and the referece group at entry. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 86:796-813

All of these experiments are summarized in the psychology review article:

E. Tory Higgins and Thane S. Pittman. Motives of the Human Animal: Comprehending, Managing, and Sharing Inner States. Annu. Rev. Psychol. 2008. 59:361-85