Browsing by Subject "Social psychology"

Although people frequently pursue multiple goals simultaneously, these goals often conflict with each other. For instance, consumers may have both a healthy eating goal and a goal to have an enjoyable eating experience. In this dissertation, I focus on two sources of enjoyment in eating experiences that may conflict with healthy eating: consuming tasty food (Essay 1) and affiliating with indulging dining companions (Essay 2). In both essays, I examine solutions and strategies that decrease the conflict between healthy eating and these aspects of enjoyment in the eating experience, thereby enabling consumers to resolve such goal conflicts.

Essay 1 focuses on the well-established conflict between having healthy food and having tasty food and introduces a novel product offering (“vice-virtue bundles”) that can help consumers simultaneously address both health and taste goals. Through several experiments, I demonstrate that consumers often choose vice-virtue bundles with small proportions (¼) of vice and that they view such bundles as healthier than but equally tasty as bundles with larger vice proportions, indicating that “healthier” does not always have to equal “less tasty.”

Essay 2 focuses on a conflict between healthy eating and affiliation with indulging dining companions. The first set of experiments provides evidence of this conflict and examine why it arises (Studies 1 to 3). Based on this conflict’s origins, the second set of experiments tests strategies that consumers can use to decrease the conflict between healthy eating and affiliation with an indulging dining companion (Studies 4 and 5), such that they can make healthy food choices while still being liked by an indulging dining companion. Thus, Essay 2 broadens the existing picture of goals that conflict with the healthy eating goal and, together with Essay 1, identifies solutions to such goal conflicts.

The value of task-related conflict to team effectiveness continues to generate controversy in organizational studies. I argue that this debate reflects as much differences in the conceptualization of conflict by scholars from separate traditions as it does variation in empirical settings and methods. The model proposed in this research is a more general framework for the study of team conflict that clarifies, accommodates, and reconciles to a large degree the divergent findings of prior research. It suggests that recent pessimism about the value of team conflict is overstated, and it offers a number of promising paths through which task-related conflict may improve team performance and satisfaction. Chapter 1 reviews the history of this debate and introduces the model of team conflict. Chapter 2 documents a test of the model's propositions in a correlational study of 223 MBA teams conducting a decision-making exercise. Chapter 3 features an experimental test of the model with a forecasting task completed by 60 3-person groups. And Chapter 4 revisits the conflict over conflict in light of the studies presented herein.

Extensive evidence demonstrates how mental illness symptomatology can inhibit perceptions of and actual performance on important tasks. However, receiving treatment from the medical establishment for such symptomatology requires diagnosis, whereby the patient becomes labeled and subject to the stereotypes connected to that label. Mental illness labeling is associated with a variety of negative outcomes including inhibited access to unemployment, housing, health insurance, and marriage and parenthood opportunities and can disrupt interpersonal relationships. However, the repercussions of mental illness labeling for one area of life have remained largely overlooked; that area is task performance. Adults spend a substantial portion of their lives at work engaged in group-based or individual level tasks. This dissertation explores external perceptions of mental illness in task groups and the role of self-internalization of stereotypes about mental illness in individual task performance through two experimental studies.

Previous research has revealed that, on average, task partners with a mental illness are stigmatized and subject to diminished status when they are identified to participants as having been hospitalized for general psychological problems for an extended period of time. Study 1 of this dissertation explores the stigma- and status-based attributions triggered by engaging with a partner in a mutual task who is identified as having a specific mental illness label: none, Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD), Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), or schizophrenia.

Additionally, research has revealed that members of a group about which negative stereotypes exist may face a situational threat in a domain relevant task--stereotype threat. Race, gender, social class, age, and a variety of other sociodemographic attributes can trigger stereotype threat. However, little research has considered the potential for stereotype threat to emerge on the basis of mental illness labeling. Study 2 of this dissertation focusing on individual-level performance, exploring the potential for ADHD to trigger stereotype threat in test-taking situations.

Results from Study 1 suggest that the specific mental illness labels studied, presented devoid of symptomatology severity, do not trigger stigmatized attributions but may trigger some negative status attributions in the case of a task relevant diagnosis. (ADHD). Study 2 suggests that a task relevant diagnosis may also trigger stereotype threat in a test-taking situation, negatively impacting performance. Taken together, the results indicate that task relevance of one's mental illness label may be a driving factor in negative external and internal perceptions of mental illness.

Despite the considerable influence of situational factors and the resulting variability in behavior, individuals maintain stable average ways of acting. The purpose of the studies presented in this paper was to investigate one possible explanation of this trait stability. It is hypothesized that contra-trait behaviors, those that are different from typical trait levels, demand more effort, or self-control, than do trait-typical behaviors. In Study 1, participants reported on the trait content of their behavior along with several other variables. In Study 2, participants completed several tasks in the lab and were instructed to act at contra-trait or trait-typical levels of conscientiousness. Support for the contra-trait effort hypothesis was found in Study 1: Participants reported that contra-trait behavior was more effortful than trait-typical behavior. In addition, habitual contra-trait behaviors, which do not require self-control, were exempt from this effect. In Study 2, no support was found for contra-trait hypotheses: Participants generally did not rate contra-trait behaviors as more effortful, and subsequent behaviors were not affected by contra-trait behaviors. The implications of the findings and the possible explanations of the non-findings are discussed.

Cultural transmission processes are not well understood within the field of sociology. Popular models both in cultural and network sociology tend to conceptualize transmission as simple replication, with limited research devoted to examining what systematic changes information tends to undergo as it is transmitted. By contrast, empirical cultural transmission research in psychology shows that information tends to be altered to become more consistent with cultural biases as it is shared. Understanding this consistency bias is important for understanding how cultures are reproduced, because biased transmission increases individuals’ likelihood of receiving information that reaffirms cultural biases, while impeding the spread of information that might challenge such biases. In this dissertation, I investigate different aspects of schema-consistency bias and its impact on information transmission in three empirical studies.

Chapter 2 examines how schema-consistency biases in information transmission and social psychological legitimation processes combine to perpetuate negative stereotypes about the poor. Results of a serial transmission experiment demonstrate that participants used more negative-stereotype consistent material when retelling a story about a main character that experiences a negative outcome (financial instability and unemployment) compared to a positive one (receiving training and gaining employment) following a job loss. These results demonstrate one way systematic errors in information transmission reproduce cultural biases, as individuals draw on negative stereotypes to justify misfortunes experienced by disadvantaged others.

Chapter 3 builds on the work described in Chapter 2, combining insights from the cultural cognition, affect control theory, and cultural transmission frameworks in a new serial transmission study. While previous serial transmission studies have relied on informal stereotype-based measures of cultural schema-consistency, in this study I demonstrate that affect control theory’s measure of deflection provides a formal, theory-based measure of information’s cultural schema-consistency. Further, results show that this measure is predictive of the information people share in communication: while culturally inconsistent, high-deflection information experiences an initial boost in memorability, participants ultimately tend to transform this information to increase its consistency with cultural schemas.

Chapter 4 also focuses on the issue of measuring culture. In this study, I develop a new concept-association-based method for collecting schema data from individuals, as well as a corresponding conceptual association network measure of cultural schemas, using differences between liberal and conservative schemas of poverty in the United States as a test case. Study results show that concept network representations of liberal and conservative schemas of poverty are characterized by large overlaps, punctuated by a few salient differences in terms of associations related to individual (e.g.- laziness, dishonesty) vs structural (e.g.- lacking government safety nets, racism) concepts. I find that these partisan differences in poverty schemas, when internalized by individuals, are predictive of differences in policy preferences regarding government aid spending.

Taken together, these studies aim to advance current debates about measuring culture and about the cognitive and social psychological mechanisms underpinning cultural processes. Specifically, the ultimate goal of this research is to better understand information transmission as a mechanism that connects micro-level cognitive and social psychological processes to larger scale cultural phenomena.

This dissertation aims to investigate the ways in which culture shape how people perceive, remember, and transmit information to one another and how that information can be shaped by culture. I specifically study: (1) how stigma and stereotypes affect how individuals discern and recall information about an individual with schizophrenia; and (2) how political partisanship may alter one’s perceptions of an ambiguous social interaction that is politically salient. To answer these questions, I conduct two experiments and collect data from online participants. In the first study, I recruit participants from Amazon Mechanical Turk to read a story about an individual with schizophrenia and retell it from memory. In my second study, I recruit participants from Prolific, and I ask them to watch a video and label the characters involved in the interaction they watched. I find that biases about individuals with schizophrenia shape the content participants remember and transmit, leading to narratives that become more stereotype-consistent over time. I also find that political partisanship has a strong relationship with how participants label the characters involved in the video of my second study. These findings contribute to the fields of cultural sociology, medical sociology, and political polarization. While varied in approach, both experiments show that culture, in a variety of forms, shapes not only how individuals interpret the world, but also how they interact with it.

Theories of self-regulation address the continuous process in which individuals compare their behavior to salient goals or standards. Two well-known theories of self-regulation, self-discrepancy theory (SDT) and regulatory focus theory (RFT), each make distinctions regarding the types of standards and goals in reference to which individuals self-regulate. Authenticity--the idea of being one's true self--has the potential to influence the kinds of goals or standards that individuals come to possess and may have implications for understanding the outcomes of self-regulatory processes. This research links the construct of authenticity with SDT and RFT, emphasizing how individual differences in authenticity could influence the motivational and affective consequences of self-regulation predicted within each theory. Individual differences in authenticity were expected to influence the nature of the goals and standards that individuals hold, as well as the acute and chronic affective consequences of discrepancies between the actual self and the ideal and ought self-guides respectively. Specifically, individual differences in authenticity were expected to predict magnitude of actual:ideal and actual:ought self-discrepancy as well as the intensity of distress that individuals report (acutely as well as chronically) in association with self-discrepancies. More importantly, self-discrepancies were expected to be less prevalent among individuals high in authenticity, but more distressing among high-authenticity individuals than among individuals with lower levels of authenticity. The results of this research suggest that individual differences in authentic behavior do have a direct influence on both acute and chronic affect. Authenticity was found to interact with self-discrepancies in predicting chronic affect. Authenticity has a unique role in the process of self-regulation, distinct from the contributions of SDT and RFT.

Public opinion tools are used to look at voter motivations to engage in clientelistic practices and their variation across structures of competition.

This dissertation explores the interrelated dynamics of economic and political inequality, economic insecurity, and psychological well-being through three connected empirical studies. The first study adjudicates between conflicting findings in the unequal policy responsiveness literature. Many studies of the relative influence of income groups on U.S. policy have focused on issues over which affluent and average Americans disagree. However, scholars have posited different ways of both defining policy disagreement and measuring policy responsiveness. I assess the impact of 22 definitions of policy disagreement and two methods of measuring policy influence—based on win rates and policy change rates—on analyses of unequal responsiveness. The results of this analysis consistently indicate that U.S. policymaking institutions respond to the preferences of the affluent, but not those of average Americans. The second study examines gendered effects of unemployment on the subjective well-being of different-sex U.S. couples using recent data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID). I eliminate the confounding influence of time-invariant person-specific characteristics that could impact both unemployment transitions and well-being through fixed effects analysis. While husbands’ unemployment is negatively associated with wives’ well-being, I find no evidence that wives’ unemployment spills over to impact husbands’ cognitive or affective well-being. The final study looks at the relationship between income change and psychological health and investigates possible asymmetry in this relationship. Analyzing data from the PSID with a combination of first-difference estimation and spline regression, I find support for the hypothesis that income losses have a larger impact than income gains on subjective well-being among partnered adults. The relationships between income changes and well-being are insignificant for single adults. Together, these studies offer new insights into the ways economic power and vulnerability shape the subjective and material realities of life for individuals and families in the United States.

Background: The role of grandparents has changed in response to social, economic and demographic factors, which may operate both in favour of or against the relationship between grandparents and their grandchildren. The potential positive impact of the grandparent-grandchild relationship on the development of adolescent grandchildren has been increasingly recognized, although relatively few studies have directly related this relationship to measures of child well-being. This study aims to examine the association between grandparent-grandchild interactions and socio-emotional and cognitive outcomes among adolescent grandchildren in Sri Lanka. Methods: This cross-sectional study was conducted within schools, temples, homes and community buildings in Galle District. An interviewer-assisted survey was used to collect data about the adolescent participants’ demographics, family and household information, grandparent relationships, empathy, and socio-emotional development. A cognitive test was used to assess the adolescents’ cognitive development. Univariate, bivariate and multivariate analyses were used to examine the association between the grandparent-grandchild relationship and adolescent outcomes. Results: Our results indicate that grandparent-grandchild relationships are significantly associated with adolescent socio-emotional and cognitive development. Conclusions: This study underlines the importance of the grandparent-grandchild relationship.

Though families come in all shapes and sizes, many people recognize the birth of their first child as the start of their new family. The transition to parenthood that expectant parents experience has important implications for their future health and the health of their children. This dissertation investigates the experiences of new and expectant parents as they develop their new roles. The findings draw on publicly-available conversations from parenting forums. Investigative phenomenology, descriptive phenomenology, and quantitative analysis are used to explore three research questions: 1) How do people experience perinatal loss? 2) What are parents’ experiences of working with nurses when their infant is in a neonatal critical care unit? 3) What emotions do men experience on their journey to fatherhood? The findings of this dissertation indicate that the transition to parenthood is a time of ambiguity, stress, and potentially, great joy for new parents. During this transition, people take on new identities, perform new roles, experience a broad range of emotions, and develop new relationships. The impacts of this transition are lifelong, so support is vital to promoting the formation of healthy, well-adjusted families. For healthcare providers and researchers, there is a great deal that can be done to help new and expectant parents feel supported and respected. A few of the many potential tools providers and researchers can use include mindfulness, non-judgement, and therapeutic communication.

Marketers seek to create and consumers seek to cultivate a variety of positive emotional experiences. Despite their importance to consumer behavior, researchers have lacked a clear understanding of the distinct behavioral consequences of specific positive emotions. My dissertation examines how different positive emotions (e.g., hope, love, and pride) can differentially affect consumers' decisions and behaviors. I find that positive emotions can not only be differentiated but also that specific positive emotions lead to distinctly different patterns of consumption behavior, such as considering more options, donating in different ways, engaging in more effortful actions, or performing more socially conscious consumption behaviors benefiting distant others. I find important differences both with momentary emotional experiences and downstream consequences of chronic emotional experiences.

Positive emotions differ reliably in the degree to which they create a lens of problem-solving, social connection, and perceived control. For example, I find that positive emotions characterized by a social connection lens (e.g., love and gratitude) lead to increases in socially conscious behaviors benefiting distant others. The tendency to perceive one's environment through a problem-solving lens (which characterizes hope and interest but not love and gratitude) leads to larger consideration sets and engagement in more effortful environmental actions. I also examine how positive emotions characterized by different lenses, such as perceived control (e.g., pride) and social connection (e.g., love), produce distinct behaviors within the same consumption context (e.g., giving in different ways in response to a fundraising appeal). Five studies demonstrate that positive emotions can be characterized in ways that allow prediction of distinct forms of broadening and specific consumption behaviors.

There is wide variation in the empirical evidence of a relationship between self-regulation and health-related behaviors. This variability owes to, at least in part, a lack of systematic distinction between instances in which self-regulation could influence behavior and instances in which it could not, regardless of a person’s standing on this construct. Without this distinction, the true influence of self-regulation on behavior is aggregated with irrelevant relationships. This dissertation introduces a framework that systematically organizes the context into features common to and shared by self-regulation strategies, with the aim of improving the understanding of when and how self-regulation influences behavior. To start, Chapter 1 provides a brief overview of the ways in which context has been studied in social psychology and personality fields. Based on this summary, Chapter 2 introduces the framework for describing and organizing the features of contexts and then applies the framework to four self-regulation strategies. Chapter 2 ends with an illustration of how the framework can help identify when and how self-regulation can influence behavior. Chapters 3 through 6 empirically examine this framework by presenting the accepted versions of four published manuscripts. Specifically, Chapter 3 reports a qualitative study of descriptions of self-control challenges and their consequences, demonstrating that the contexts in which people make decisions about their behaviors shape what is possible, desirable, and overall adaptive. Chapter 4 reports a meta-analysis of the published and unpublished literature on the relationship between self-control and several behaviors within the domains of physical activity, healthy eating, and healthier sleep. The chapter discusses possible explanations for the variable associations between self-control and behaviors in these domains, including a lack of fit between what self-control assumes and what studies assess and the possibility that certain behaviors—as they were defined—relied on strategies other than self-control. Chapters 5 and 6 build upon Chapter 4 by examining how contextual changes shift the dynamic between self-regulation and behavior. Specifically, Chapter 5 reports a study that examined the influence of context on the relationship between self-regulation strategies and ten categories of behaviors. This study showed that context changes influenced the extent to which behaviors were habitual or routine-like, but that self-control reduced the likelihood that behavior changed along with the severity of context changes. Chapter 6 reports a secondary analysis of longitudinal data on substance use in adolescence. This study examined whether the context could overwhelm the protective effect of self-control against adolescent alcohol use. To conclude this dissertation, Chapter 7 offers a general discussion of how my work has investigated the various features of the proposed framework, how the proposed framework may be extended, and the directions of my future research.

In this dissertation, I propose, operationalize, and test a novel model of identity fragility using fragile masculinity as a case study. To date, identity research has largely focused on understanding how people’s membership in different social categories (e.g., gender, race) shapes their experiences, self-concept, and behavior. I contend that when (i) a social category is high-status and (ii) its corresponding norms are especially rigid—as is often the case with masculinity—people in this category may feel pressured to uphold its norms in order to maintain their status. To the extent that identities are pressured, I argue that they are “fragile”, in turn eliciting compensatory, stereotypical responses (e.g., male aggression) to perceived threats aimed at maintaining status. Supporting the proposed model, I found that young men’s (Study 1) and post-pubertal boys’ (Study 3) aggressive cognition post-threat was directly related to the extent to which their masculine behavior was extrinsically motivated (pressured). In Study 2, I found that straight men’s anti-gay bias was again predicted by a combination of extrinsic pressure and threat, which was partially mediated by men’s endorsement of gender-inversion stereotypes (e.g., gay = feminine). Finally, as one possible pathway to reduce these adverse pressures and compensatory aggression, in Study 4, I found that identity-salient events like U.S. presidential elections can loosen masculinity norms from the “top-down” to mitigate certain men’s sociopolitical aggression.

Three studies focus on an intriguing paradox in the associations between gender, friendship quality, and loneliness, and examine whether gender differences in friendship expectations help explain why the paradox occurs. Study 1 (n = 1761 college undergraduates) documents the three elements of this paradox: (1) females reported higher levels of various positive features in their friendships than did males; (2) higher levels of positive friendship features were associated with lower levels of loneliness; and (3) males and females reported similar levels of loneliness. Consistent with this paradox, when friendship features were statistically controlled, a statistical suppression effect was found such that females reported higher levels of loneliness than did males.

Study 2 (n = 1008 young adults aged 18 to 29) replicated each of the findings from Study 1 using a revised and expanded measure that reliably assessed a broader set of distinct friendship features. In addition to measuring friendship features and loneliness, Study 2 also examined friendship satisfaction, and here too a striking suppression effect emerged. Specifically, although females reported slightly higher levels of friendship satisfaction than did males, females reported lower levels of friendship satisfaction than did males when friendship features were statistically controlled. Another noteworthy finding was that several friendship features were more strongly related to friendship satisfaction for females than they were for males, suggesting that females may be more "sensitive" to subtle variations in friendship features than are males.

Study 3 (n = 419 young adults aged 18 to 29) further replicated the suppression effects observed in Studies 1 and 2, and was designed to learn whether gender differences in friendship expectations would help explain the paradox and suppression effects. Two different facets of friendship expectations were hypothesized and assessed with newly developed, highly reliable measures of each facet. The first facet, referred to as "feature-specific friendship expectations," focused on the degree to which individuals expect a best friendship to be characterized by each of the friendship features that were assessed in Study 2. The second facet, referred to as "feature-specific friendship standards," focused on identifying where individuals "set the bar" in deciding whether or not a friend's actions have fulfilled expectations in various friendship feature domains.

Gender differences were found for both facets of friendship expectations with females generally having higher expectations for their friends than did males. The two facets were only moderately correlated, and related in distinct ways to other variables of interest. Findings indicated that higher levels of feature-specific friendship expectations were generally associated with more positive functioning in the social domain (i.e., higher levels of positive friendship features and friendship satisfaction), whereas higher levels of feature-specific friendship standards were associated with potentially more problematic functioning (i.e., more negative responses to ambiguous violations of friendship expectations).

Study 3 also tested the hypothesis that discrepancies between feature-specific friendship expectations and the quality of a person's best friendship on each of the same features are associated with loneliness and also with friendship satisfaction. Polynomial regression analysis, rather than the traditional difference score approach, was used to test this hypothesis. The discrepancy hypothesis was not supported with regard to either loneliness or friendship satisfaction; possible explanations for this finding are discussed.

Together, findings from the three studies provide evidence of the replicability of the observed paradox, identify friendship quality as a suppressor variable on gender differences in loneliness and friendship satisfaction, and provide evidence for the existence of two distinct facets of friendship expectations. Results from this dissertation suggest important directions for future research designed to better understand the linkages among gender, social cognition, and social experience in contributing to emotional well-being for young adults.

Social trust has long been of interest as a micro-level factor that is predictive of prosocial attitudes and behaviors. In this dissertation I argue that the relationship between social trust and prosocial behaviors not one-to-one. My argument is informed by social psychological theory and work from the cognitive sciences on the importance of cultural factors in individual decision-making. Specifically, my theoretical argument is that widespread beliefs about the trustfulness of people in general, cultural trust, moderates the relationship between social trust and prosociality. I test this theory in three studies: 1) analysis of interview data on social trust and self-reported prosocial behavior, 2) an experimental study involving a public goods game, and 3) a cross-national, comparative study of observational data. The results of these studies have important implications for the studies of social trust and prosocial behaviors. The first study suggests that whether an individual believes people in general are trustworthy or not has more to do with perceptions shaped by cultural factors rather than experiences. The second and third studies clarify the role of cultural trust in the social trust-prosociality relationship. Namely, that high trustors are inclined to behave cooperatively, but this depends on their inferring from cultural trust what the likely behaviors others will be. The findings of these dissertation studies demonstrate that social trust is an important, but insufficient predictor of prosociality. A cultural environment characterized by low social trust can induce an equilibrium where even high trustors who would prefer to act prosocially behave selfishly, inferring others will not reciprocate their cooperation. They imply that for the maintenance of important public goods the information environment may be as important a place for interventions to promote cooperation as are education and institutional arrangements.

An abstract of a dissertation that examines the motivational foundations of social networks. Five studies using diverse methods examine goal pursuit as an antecedent to social network structure, finding that self-oriented and affiliation-oriented goal pursuit evoke unique patterns of interpersonal perception and motivation which lead to the development of sparser and denser social networks, respectively. Study 1 serves as an empirical summary of our theorizing: individuals primed with dense networks feel more efficacious pursuing affiliation-oriented goals versus self-oriented goals, and individuals primed with sparse networks feel more efficacious pursuing self-oriented goals than individuals primed with dense networks. Study 2finds a correlation between personal goals and network structure. Studies 3 and 4 experimentally demonstrate that reminders of self versus affiliation-oriented goals lead to different cognitively-activated network structures. Study 5 finds that individuals entering a new social network with strong career goals (self-oriented goals) develop significantly sparser local networks and attain more central network positions; the opposite pattern emerges for individuals pursuing strong social goals (affiliation-oriented goals). Individuals strongly motivated to pursue both goals lose the network structure benefits of having a strong career goal. Findings support the hypothesis linking personal goal pursuit to network structure, a novel approach to integrating psychology and networks research.

Since the cognitive ability to process information is limited, people often rely on stereotypes to help them make sense of their social environment. These knowledge structures allow people to utilize past experiences and social learning to infer the characteristics and behaviors of individual group members. Stereotypes provide their holders with scripts, specifying how to interact with members of specific social groups (e.g., what products to choose or avoid and how certain actions may be interpreted). Despite the prevalent use of stereotypes in daily life, little research in consumer behavior has examined the role of stereotypes from this perspective. I propose that consumers use stereotype knowledge to navigate interpersonal interactions through adjusting their self-evaluations and product choices to match the needs of the social situation. My research suggests that both the stereotypes applied to the self and those applied to others have implications for how consumers strategically leverage this socially shared knowledge when interacting with others.

In Essay 1, I examine how consumers use stereotypes to guide their self-evaluations when preparing to interact with someone who may stereotype them. Most interestingly, consumers are selective in what aspects of the stereotype they take on, depending on whether they have more interdependent or independent self-construals. In three studies, I demonstrate that individuals with more interdependent self-construals engage in selective self-stereotyping and that these shifts in self-evaluations are specifically tailored to the preferences and expectations of the interaction partner. However, I find that individuals with more independent self-construals engage in selective counter self-stereotyping in order to distance themselves from the constraints of the stereotype and also to rebuff the expectations of the interaction partner.

Essay 2 examines the various impression management concerns that arise when consumers choose products to share with others. I find that when the consumer has little information regarding his consumption partner, stereotypes related to the consumption partner's social group are used to guide product choices. Whether the chosen products are stereotype consistent or inconsistent depend on the consumer's social goals and the consumption partner's expectations. Across four studies, I take both the perspectives of the consumer making the choice and the consumption partner to examine the various strategies adopted for making joint consumption choices and also to evaluate the interpersonal consequences of these strategies.