How do I love thee? Let me count the Js: implicit egotism and interpersonal attraction

Fitting the name or unworthy of the name?—Does the name of family firm major shareholder influence family’s egoistic behavior?

It has been generally believed that the major shareholders of family firms are more willing to implement egoistic behaviors aimed at benefiting the family. This study analyses whether the major shareholder of the family firm whose name contains “Confucian symbols” such as benevolence, righteousness, loyalty, and kindness will reduce family self-interested behaviors as his name indicates. Using a sample consisting of all 425 family firms listed on Small and Medium Enterprise Board and Growth Enterprise Board, the result shows that the major shareholder whose name contains Confucian symbols is less likely to misappropriate corporate assets and less likely to make “family-first” personnel arrangements, meanwhile is more open to external supervision. Further mechanism testing reveals that the major shareholder whose name contains Confucian symbols also tends to choose corporate culture that reflects Confucianism. The study confirms that the name of the major shareholder is one of the factors which can affect the operation of the family business, demonstrates that different family firms have different attitudes towards family self-interest, and promotes the extant research from the “differences between family and non-family firms” level further to the “differences among family firms running by different families” level.

Measuring ethical behavior with AI and natural language processing to assess business success

Everybody claims to be ethical. However, there is a huge difference between declaring ethical behavior and living up to high ethical standards. In this paper, we demonstrate that “hidden honest signals” in the language and the use of “small words” can show true moral values and behavior of individuals and organizations and that this ethical behavior is correlated to real-world success; however not always in the direction we might expect. Leveraging the latest advances of AI in natural language processing (NLP), we construct three different “tribes” of ethical, moral, and non-ethical people, based on Twitter feeds of people of known high and low ethics and morals: fair and modest collaborators codified as ethical “bees”; hard-working competitive workers as moral “ants”; and selfish, arrogant people as non-ethical “leeches”. Results from three studies involving a total of 49 workgroups and 281 individuals within three different industries (healthcare, business consulting, and higher education) confirm the validity of our model. Associating membership in ethical or unethical tribes with performance, we find that being ethical correlates positively or negatively with success depending on the context.

Identity Selection and the Social Construction of Birthdays

We argue that rather than being a wholly random event, birthdays are sometimes selected by parents. We further argue that such effects have changed over time and are the result of important psychological processes. Long ago, U.S. American parents greatly overclaimed holidays as their children's birthdays. These effects were larger for more important holidays, and they grew smaller as births moved to hospitals and became officially documented. These effects were exaggerated for ethnic groups that deeply valued specific holidays. Parents also overclaimed well-liked calendar days and avoided disliked calendar days as their children's birthdays. However, after birthday selection effects virtually disappeared in the 1950s and 1960s, they reappeared after the emergence of labor induction and planned cesarean birth. For example, there are many fewer modern U.S. births than would be expected on Christmas Day. In addition, modern parents appear to use birth medicalization to avoid undesirable birthdays (Friday the 13th). We argue that basking in reflect glory, ethnic identity processes, and superstitions such as magical thinking all play a role in birthday selection effects. Discussion focuses on the power of social identity in day-to-day judgment and decision-making.

Parental Investment Is Biased toward Children Named for Their Fathers

Namesaking (naming a child after a parent or other relative) can be viewed as a mechanism to increase perceived parent-child similarity and, consequently, parental investment. Male and, to a lesser extent, firstborn children are more frequently namesakes than female and later-born children, respectively. However, a direct link between namesaking and parental investment has not been examined. In the present study, 632 participants (98 men and 534 women) from Central Europe indicated their first name, sex, birth order, number of siblings, sexual orientation, socioeconomic status, paternal and maternal first names, as well as relationship quality with, and time and financial investment they received from, both parents during childhood. Mixed-effects models revealed associations between namesaking and parental investment. However, the effect of namesaking often appeared significant only in interaction with specific predictors, such as sex and primogeniture. It suggests instead that namesaking has an additive effect-it enhances the effect of biological factors on parental investment. In general, we found evidence for the bias in parental investment linked to name similarity among both parents, and support for the hypothesis that namesaking serves as a mechanism to increase paternity confidence and, thus, paternal investment. The effect of namesaking influences only certain types of parental investment-namely, those at the level of relationship quality. In addition, nonheterosexual orientation was the strongest negative predictor of paternal investment. Our study extends the research on parental investment by showing that cultural mechanisms, such as namesaking, can also exert some influence on parental rearing behavior.

Moderators of the Liking Bias in Judgments of Moral Character

Previous research found evidence for a liking bias in moral character judgments because judgments of liked people are higher than those of disliked or neutral ones. This article sought conditions moderating this effect. In Study 1 (N = 792), the impact of the liking bias on moral character judgments was strongly attenuated when participants were educated that attitudes bias moral judgments. In Study 2 (N = 376), the influence of liking on moral character attributions was eliminated when participants were accountable for the justification of their moral judgments. Overall, these results suggest that although liking biases moral character attributions, this bias might be reduced or eliminated when deeper information processing is required to generate judgments of others’ moral character.

Perceptual prioritization of self-associated voices

Information associated with the self is prioritized relative to information associated with others and is therefore processed more quickly and accurately. Across three experiments, we examined whether a new externally-generated voice could become associated with the self and thus be prioritized in perception. In the first experiment, participants learned associations between three unfamiliar voices and three identities (self, friend, stranger). Participants then made speeded judgements of whether voice-identity pairs were correctly matched, or not. A clear self-prioritization effect was found, with participants showing quicker and more accurate responses to the newly self-associated voice relative to either the friend- or stranger- voice. In two further experiments, we tested whether this prioritization effect increased if the self-voice was gender-matched to the identity of the participant (Experiment 2) or if the self-voice was chosen by the participant (Experiment 3). Gender-matching did not significantly influence prioritization; the self-voice was similarly prioritized when it matched the gender identity of the listener as when it did not. However, we observed that choosing the self-voice did interact with prioritization (Experiment 3); the self-voice became more prominent, via lesser prioritization of the other identities, when the self-voice was chosen relative to when it was not. Our findings have implications for the design and selection of individuated synthetic voices used for assistive communication devices, suggesting that agency in choosing a new vocal identity may modulate the distinctiveness of that voice relative to others.

The relationship between endowment and ownership effects in memory across cultures

An object one owns is typically more highly valued than an equivalent object owned by another person. This endowment effect has been attributed to the aversion of loss of one's possessions (through selling), or the added value of an item due to self-association (through owning). To date, investigation of these mechanisms has been hampered by the between-subjects methodology traditionally employed to measure endowment. Over two experiments, we report a novel within-subjects method for measuring an endowment bias. In these studies, Western participants showed enhanced valuation of owned items, whereas East-Asian participants did not. This endowment bias also correlated with the ownership effect in memory (a measure of self-referential processing) in Western, but not East-Asian participants. Our results suggest that the endowment effect is partly predicated on the same factors that influence the ownership effect and that this commonality is likely linked to conceptions of ownership specifically, and self-concept more generally.

Polar Similars: Using Massive Mobile Dating Data to Predict Synchronization and Similarity in Dating Preferences

Leveraging a massive dataset of over 421 million potential matches between single users on a leading mobile dating application, we were able to identify numerous characteristics of effective matching. Effective matching is defined as the exchange of contact information with the likely intent to meet in person. The characteristics of effective match include alignment of psychological traits (i.e., extroversion), physical traits (i.e., height), personal choices (i.e., desiring the same relationship type), and shared experiences. For nearly all characteristics, the more similar the individuals were, the higher the likelihood was of them finding each other desirable and opting to meet in person. The only exception was introversion, where introverts rarely had an effective match with other introverts. When investigating the preliminary stages of the choice process we looked at the consistency between the choice of men/women, the time it took users to make these binary choices, and the tendency of yes/no decisions. We used a biologically inspired choice model to estimate the decision process and could predict the selection and response time with nearly 60% accuracy. Given that people make their initial selection in no more than 11 s, and ultimately prefer a partner who shares numerous attributes with them, we suggest that users are less selective in their early preferences and gradually, during their conversation, converge onto clusters that share a high degree of similarity in characteristics.

A Demonstration of the Collaborative Replication and Education Project: Replication Attempts of the Red-Romance Effect

The present article reports the results of a meta-analysis of nine student replication projects of Elliot et al.’s (2010) findings from Experiment 3, that women were more attracted to photographs of men with red borders (total n = 640). The eight student projects were part of the Collaborative Replication and Education Project (CREP; https://osf.io/wfc6u/), a research crowdsourcing project for undergraduate students. All replications were reviewed by experts to ensure high quality data, and were pre-registered prior to data collection. Results of this meta-analysis showed no effect of red on attractiveness ratings for either perceived attractiveness (mean ratings difference = –0.07, 95% CI [–0.31, 0.16]) or sexual attractiveness (mean ratings difference = –0.06, 95% CI [–0.36, 0.24]); this null result held with and without Elliot et al.’s (2010) data included in analyses. Exploratory analyses examining whether being in a relationship moderated the effect of color on attractiveness ratings also produced null results.

Domains of similarity and attraction in three types of relationships

For decades, social scientists have observed that people greatly desire a partner who is similar to themselves. Less is known, however, about whether particular similarity domains (e.g., music preferences) may uniquely influence relationship formation. We address this gap by examining people’s preferences for 18 similarity domains in three types of relationships: friendships, casual/short-term, and long-term. The most important similarity domains, across the three relationship types, were political views, career goals, food preferences, travel desires, and music preferences. General similarity was most important in long-term rather than in friendships and casual/short-term relationships, with the latter two relationship types not differing from one another. This pattern emerged for all similarity domains with four exceptions: preferences for books, video games, computer brands, and cell phone brands. No sex differences emerged in similarity domains except in preferences in video games and brands of cell phones and computers. Men rated these domains to be more important than did women. All three of these differences were of relatively small effect size. We tie this work into the larger body of research on similarity and preferences for partner traits.

Seeing beyond political affiliations: The mediating role of perceived moral foundations on the partisan similarity-liking effect

Decades of research have demonstrated that we like people who are more similar to us. The present research tested a potential mechanism for this similarity-liking effect in the domain of politics: the stereotype that people's political orientation reflects their morals. People believe that Democrats are more likely to endorse individualizing morals like fairness and Republicans are more likely to endorse binding morals like obedience to authority. Prior to the 2016 election, American participants (N = 314) viewed an ostensible Facebook profile that shared an article endorsing conservative ideals (pro-Trump or pro-Republican), or liberal ideals (pro-Clinton or pro-Democrat). Participants rated the favorability of the profile-owner, and completed the Moral Foundations Questionnaire for the profile-owner and themselves. As predicted, participants liked the profile-owner more when they shared political beliefs, and used political stereotypes to infer the moral foundations of the profile-owner. Additionally, the perceived moral foundation endorsement of the profile owner differentially mediated the relationship between the ideology and evaluations of the profile owner based on the party affiliation of the participant: perceived individualizing foundations mediated the relationship for Democratic participants and perceived binding foundations mediated the relationship for Republican participants. In other words, people liked their in-group members more because they thought that the profile-owner endorsed a specific type of morals. In Study 2 (N = 486), we ruled out the potential explanation that any political stereotype can account for the similarity-liking effect, replicating the results of Study 1 even when controlling for perceptions of other personality differences. Taken together, these studies highlight that there may be something unique about the perceived type of morality of political in-group and out-group members that may be contributing to the similarity-liking effect in politics.

Hot Speech and Exploding Bombs: Autonomic Arousal During Emotion Classification of Prosodic Utterances and Affective Sounds

Emotional expressions provide strong signals in social interactions and can function as emotion inducers in a perceiver. Although speech provides one of the most important channels for human communication, its physiological correlates, such as activations of the autonomous nervous system (ANS) while listening to spoken utterances, have received far less attention than in other domains of emotion processing. Our study aimed at filling this gap by investigating autonomic activation in response to spoken utterances that were embedded into larger semantic contexts. Emotional salience was manipulated by providing information on alleged speaker similarity. We compared these autonomic responses to activations triggered by affective sounds, such as exploding bombs, and applause. These sounds had been rated and validated as being either positive, negative, or neutral. As physiological markers of ANS activity, we recorded skin conductance responses (SCRs) and changes of pupil size while participants classified both prosodic and sound stimuli according to their hedonic valence. As expected, affective sounds elicited increased arousal in the receiver, as reflected in increased SCR and pupil size. In contrast, SCRs to angry and joyful prosodic expressions did not differ from responses to neutral ones. Pupil size, however, was modulated by affective prosodic utterances, with increased dilations for angry and joyful compared to neutral prosody, although the similarity manipulation had no effect. These results indicate that cues provided by emotional prosody in spoken semantically neutral utterances might be too subtle to trigger SCR, although variation in pupil size indicated the salience of stimulus variation. Our findings further demonstrate a functional dissociation between pupil dilation and skin conductance that presumably origins from their differential innervation.

Is Red Really Romantic?

Abstract. Red has been reported to enhance attraction for women rating men ( Elliot et al., 2010 ) and men rating women ( Elliot & Niesta, 2008 ). We replicated one of these studies online and in-person. To ensure rigor, we obtained original materials, planned for informative sample sizes, pre-registered our study, used a positive control, and adopted quality controls. For men, we found a very weak effect in the predicted direction (d = 0.09, 95% CI [−0.17, 0.34], N = 242). For women, we found a very weak effect in the opposite direction (d = −0.09, 95% CI [−0.30, 0.12], N = 360). The original studies may have overestimated the red effect, our studies may be an underestimate, or there could be strong moderation of the effect of red on attraction.

Social Traces of Generic Humans Increase the Value of Everyday Objects

Past research finds that people behave as though the particular qualities of specific, strongly valenced individuals "rub off" on objects. People thus value a sweater worn by George Clooney but are disgusted by one worn by Hitler. We hypothesized that social traces of generic humans can also adhere to objects, increasing their value. Experiments 1 and 2 found that simply marking that consumer products (mugs, giftwrap) were made by generic strangers (e.g., "by people using machines" vs. "by machines run by people") increased their perceived value. Experiment 3 demonstrated that this effect was mediated by thoughts about attention the object received from other people, which, in turn, led people to see the object as possessing more positive social qualities (e.g., friendly), increasing valuation. The results suggest that generic humans are perceived positively, possessing warm social qualities, and these can "rub off" and adhere to everyday objects increasing their value.

Birds of a Feather Laugh Together: An Investigation of Humour Style Similarity in Married Couples

The present research investigated the degree of similarity in humour styles between spouses as assessed with the Humour Styles Questionnaire (HSQ). Furthermore, self-esteem was investigated as a potential moderator of partner humour style similarity. A sample of 116 heterosexual, married couples independently completed questionnaires assessing self-reported humour styles across the 32 item HSQ, as well as global self-esteem. Results indicated that there is significant positive association between the humour styles of married partners. This association was moderated by individual self-esteem. Specifically, participants with high self-esteem were found to have greater humour style similarity with their partners. Similarity was also greater for positive compared to negative types of humour. Implications for the use of dyadic data in investigating the roles of humour within couples are discussed.

Nicknames Increase Longevity

We investigated the effect of having a nickname on the longevity of major league baseball players. Ages of death, birth year, and career lengths of major league baseball players who debuted prior to 1950 were obtained and we compared longevities of players with nicknames with those who did not have a nickname. After controlling for these factors in analysis of covariance, there was a statistically significant increase in longevity of 2.5 years associated with having a nickname. Players with nicknames ( N = 2,666; 38.1%) lived an average of 68.6 (±15.1 S.D.) years compared to players without nicknames ( N = 4,329; 61.9%) who lived an average of 66.1 (±16.1) years. We attributed this nickname-related effect on longevity to enhanced self-esteem.

Diversity in leadership: race in leader-member exchanges

Purpose

– The workforce is becoming increasingly diverse and yet leadership research has lagged behind this trend. In particular, theory links leader-member exchange (LMX) to the development of racially diverse leaders (e.g. Scandura and Lankau, 1996). Yet, there remains a need for empirical evaluation of this premise. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Design/methodology/approach

– In this paper, results of two studies of the effects of leader-member diversity on the LMX dimensions of professional respect, affect, loyalty, and contributions were examined. In the first study, supervisor-subordinate dyads in an applied work setting were examined, while in the second study a laboratory study was used.

Findings

– Results in Study 1 indicated that cross-race and minority dyads reported different LMX attributes of professional respect, affect, loyalty and contributions compared with dyads where both members were of the racial majority. In Study 2, racial compositions of dyads was not associated with reported differences in LMX relationships, but was associated with differences in task performance.

Originality/value

– This research provides the first systematic examination of the influence of racial diversity on LMX in a leader-follower dyad. As such, this work provides an important reference point in which future research on LMX and diversity can build. Such efforts will help future organizational leaders better navigate the increasingly diverse workplace.

Testing the Generality of the Name Letter Effect: Name Initials and Everyday Attitudes

The name letter effect is the tendency to evaluate alphabetical letters in one’s name, especially initials, particularly favorably. Recent evidence suggests that name initials may even predict career choices. The authors investigated whether people possess favorable attitudes toward basic attitude objects beginning with name initials, both between individuals (e.g., does Judy like jam more than does Doug?) and within individuals (e.g., does Judy like jam more than honey?). Ratings of animals, foods, leisure activities (Studies 1-4) and national groups (Studies 2-4) revealed no object preference as a function of matching name initials. However, the name letter effect emerged (Studies 3-4), as did a clear preference for brand names starting with one’s name initials (Study 4). Self-esteem, narcissism, and stimuli characteristics did not reliably influence these effects. Implications for extending name letter effects to basic attitude processes are discussed.

Implicit Egotism

People gravitate toward people, places, and things that resemble the self. We refer to this tendency as implicit egotism, and we suggest that it reflects an unconscious process that is grounded in people's favorable self-associations. We review recent archival and experimental research that supports this position, highlighting evidence that rules out alternate explanations and distinguishes implicit egotism from closely related ideas such as mere exposure. Taken together, the evidence suggests that implicit egotism is an implicit judgmental consequence of people's positive self-associations. We conclude by identifying promising areas for future research.

The Functionality of Spontaneous Mimicry and Its Influences on Affiliation: An Implicit Socialization Account

There is a broad theoretical and empirical interest in spontaneous mimicry, or the automatic reproduction of a model's behavior. Evidence shows that people mimic models they like, and that mimicry enhances liking for the mimic. Yet, there is no satisfactory account of this phenomenon, especially in terms of its functional significance. While affiliation is often cited as the driver of mimicry, we argue that mimicry is primarily driven by a learning process that helps to produce the appropriate bodily and emotional responses to relevant social situations. Because the learning process and the resulting knowledge is implicit, it cannot easily be rejected, criticized, revised, and employed by the learner in a deliberative or deceptive manner. We argue that these characteristics will lead individuals to preferentially mimic ingroup members, whose implicit information is worth incorporating. Conversely, mimicry of the wrong person is costly because individuals will internalize "bad habits," including emotional reactions and mannerisms indicating wrong group membership. This pattern of mimicry, in turn, means that observed mimicry is an honest signal of group affiliation. We propose that the preferences of models for the mimic stems from this true signal value. Further, just like facial expressions, mimicry communicates a genuine disposition when it is truly spontaneous. Consequently, perceivers are attuned to relevant cues such as appropriate timing, fidelity, and selectivity. Our account, while assuming no previously unknown biological endowments, also explains greater mimicry of powerful people, and why affiliation can be signaled by mimicry of seemingly inconsequential behaviors.

The SPOT effect: People spontaneously prefer their own theories

People often exhibit confirmation bias: They process information bearing on the truth of their theories in a way that facilitates their continuing to regard those theories as true. Here, we tested whether confirmation bias would emerge even under the most minimal of conditions. Specifically, we tested whether drawing a nominal link between the self and a theory would suffice to bias people towards regarding that theory as true. If, all else equal, people regard the self as good (i.e., engage in self-enhancement), and good theories are true (in accord with their intended function), then people should regard their own theories as true; otherwise put, they should manifest a spontaneous preference for their own theories (i.e., a SPOT effect). In three experiments, participants were introduced to a theory about which of two imaginary alien species preyed upon the other. Participants then considered in turn several items of evidence bearing on the theory and each time evaluated the likelihood that the theory was true versus false. As hypothesized, participants regarded the theory as more likely to be true when it was arbitrarily ascribed to them as opposed to an "Alex" (Experiment 1) or to no one (Experiment 2). We also found that the SPOT effect failed to converge with four different indices of self-enhancement (Experiment 3), suggesting that it may be distinctive in character.

Social Preference in Preschoolers: Effects of Morphological Self-Similarity and Familiarity

Adults prefer to interact with others that are similar to themselves. Even slight facial self-resemblance can elicit trust towards strangers. Here we investigate if preschoolers at the age of 5 years already use facial self-resemblance when they make social judgments about others. We found that, in the absence of any additional knowledge about prospective peers, children preferred those who look subtly like themselves over complete strangers. Thus, subtle morphological similarities trigger social preferences well before adulthood.

Does Hard Work Pay Off? The Influence of Perceived Effort on Romantic Attraction

This study examines how a person’s willingness to exert effort affects how others perceive their romantic desirability. The study also examines whether the participants’ implicit theory of personality (incremental or entity) influences ratings of the target’s romantic desirability based on the target’s level of effort. Seventy-eight (17 males, 61 females) single college students participated in the study. Participants read one of four descriptions of a target. The descriptions manipulated both the target’s ability (hard work or natural ability) and success (successful or unsuccessful). Participants also completed a measure to assess their implicit theory of personality. Participants then rated the target’s desirability. There was a significant difference in desirability ratings of the target for the main effect of ability. There were no other significant differences found between the variables. The findings suggest that when a person expends effort, they are more romantically desirable regardless of how successful they are. Findings also suggest that a person’s implicit theory of personality does not interact with the target’s effort to affect romantic desirability.

The Social Dimension of Stress: Experimental Manipulations of Social Support and Social Identity in the Trier Social Stress Test

In many situations humans are influenced by the behavior of other people and their relationships with them. For example, in stressful situations supportive behavior of other people as well as positive social relationships can act as powerful resources to cope with stress. In order to study the interplay between these variables, this protocol describes two effective experimental manipulations of social relationships and supportive behavior in the laboratory. In the present article, these two manipulations are implemented in the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST)-a standard stress induction paradigm in which participants are subjected to a simulated job interview. More precisely, we propose (a) a manipulation of the relationship between different protagonists in the TSST by making a shared social identity salient and (b) a manipulation of the behavior of the TSST-selection committee, which acts either supportively or unsupportively. These two experimental manipulations are designed in a modular fashion and can be applied independently of each other but can also be combined. Moreover, these two manipulations can also be integrated into other stress protocols and into other standardized social interactions such as trust games, negotiation tasks, or other group tasks.

Changes of explicitly and implicitly measured self-esteem in the treatment of major depression: evidence for implicit self-esteem compensation

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES

Self-esteem has been claimed to be an important factor in the development and maintenance of depression. Whereas explicit self-esteem is usually reduced in depressed individuals, studies on implicitly measured self-esteem in depression exhibit a more heterogeneous pattern of results, and the role of implicit self-esteem in depression is still ambiguous. Previous research on implicit self-esteem compensation (ISEC) revealed that implicit self-esteem can mirror processes of self-esteem compensation under conditions that threaten self-esteem. We assume that depressed individuals experience a permanent threat to their selves resulting in enduring processes of ISEC. We hypothesize that ISEC as measured by implicit self-esteem will decrease when individuals recover from depression.

METHODS

45 patients with major depression received an integrative in-patient treatment in the Psychosomatic University Hospital Bonn, Germany. Depression was measured by the depression score of the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS-D). Self-esteem was assessed explicitly using the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) and implicitly by the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and the Name Letter Test (NLT).

RESULTS

As expected for a successful treatment of depression, depression scores declined during the eight weeks of treatment and explicit self-esteem rose. In line with our hypothesis, both measures of implicit self-esteem decreased, indicating reduced processes of ISEC.

LIMITATIONS

It still remains unclear, under which conditions there is an overlap of measures of implicit and explicit self-esteem.

CONCLUSIONS

The results lend support to the concept of ISEC and demonstrate the relevance of implicit self-esteem and self-esteem compensation for the understanding of depression.

The Hidden Sides of Names--Face Modeling with First Name Attributes

This paper introduces the new idea of describing people using first names. We show that describing people in terms of similarity to a vector of possible first names is a powerful representation of facial appearance that can be used for a number of important applications, such as naming never-seen faces and building facial attribute classifiers. We build models for 100 common first names used in the US and for each pair, construct a pairwise first-name classifier. These classifiers are built using training images downloaded from the internet, with no additional user interaction. This gives our approach important advantages in building practical systems that do not require additional human intervention for data labeling. The classification scores from each pairwise name classifier can be used as a set of facial attributes to describe facial appearance. We show several surprising results. Our name attributes predict the correct first names of test faces at rates far greater than chance. The name attributes are applied to gender recognition and to age classification, outperforming state-of-the-art methods with all training images automatically gathered from the internet. We also demonstrate the powerful use of our name attributes for associating faces in images with names from caption, and the important application of unconstrained face verification.

What Is Implicit Self-Esteem, and Does it Vary Across Cultures?

Implicit self-esteem (ISE), which is often defined as automatic self-evaluations, fuses research on unconscious processes with that on self-esteem. As ISE is viewed as immune to explicit control, it affords the testing of theoretical questions such as whether cultures vary in self-enhancement motivations. We provide a critical review and integration of the work on (a) the operationalization of ISE and (b) possible cultural variation in self-enhancement motivations. Although ISE measures do not often vary across cultures, recent meta-analyses and empirical studies question the validity of the most common way of defining ISE. We revive an alternative conceptualization that defines ISE in terms of how positively people evaluate objects that reflect upon themselves. This conceptualization suggests that ISE research should target alternative phenomena (e.g., minimal group effect, similarity-attraction effect, endowment effect) and it allows for a host of previous cross-cultural findings to bear on the question of cultural variability in ISE.

Individual Differences in the Name Similarity Effect

The name similarity effect is the tendency to like people, places, and things with names similar to our own. Although many researchers have examined name similarity effects on preferences and behavior, no research to date has examined whether individual differences exist in susceptibility to those effects. This research reports the results of two experiments that examine the role of self-monitoring in moderating name similarity effects. In the first experiment, name similarity effects on brand attitude and purchase intentions were found to be stronger for respondents high, rather than low, in self-monitoring. In the second experiment, the interactive effect observed in the first study was found to be especially true in a public (vs. private) usage context. These findings are consistent with theoretical expectations of name similarity effects as an expression of egotism manifested in the image and impression management concerns of high self-monitors.

The name-letter-effect in groups: sharing initials with group members increases the quality of group work

Although the name-letter-effect has been demonstrated reliably in choice contexts, recent research has called into question the existence of the name-letter-effect–the tendency among people to make choices that bear remarkable similarity with the letters in their own name. In this paper, we propose a connection between the name-letter-effect and interpersonal, group-level behavior that has not been previously captured in the literature. Specifically, we suggest that sharing initials with other group members promotes positive feelings toward those group members that in turn affect group outcomes. Using both field and laboratory studies, we found that sharing initials with group members cause groups to perform better by demonstrating greater performance, collective efficacy, adaptive conflict, and accuracy (on a hidden-profile task). Although many studies have investigated the effects of member similarity on various outcomes, our research demonstrates how minimal a degree of similarity among members is sufficient to influence quality of group outcomes.

A Two-Dimensional Model for the Study of Interpersonal Attraction

We describe a model for understanding interpersonal attraction in which attraction can be understood as a product of the initial evaluations we make about others. The model posits that targets are evaluated on two basic dimensions, capacity and willingness, such that affective and behavioral attraction result from evaluations of (a) a target’s capacity to facilitate the perceiver’s goals/needs and (b) a target’s potential willingness to facilitate those goals/needs. The plausibility of the two-dimensional model of attraction is evaluated vis-à-vis the extant literature on various attraction phenomena including the reciprocity of liking effect, pratfall effect, matching hypothesis, arousal effects, and similarity effect. We conclude that considerable evidence across a wide range of phenomena supports the idea that interpersonal attraction is principally determined by inferences about the target’s capacity and willingness.

I like My Voice Better: Self-Enhancement Bias in Perceptions of Voice Attractiveness

Previous research shows that the human voice can communicate a wealth of nonsemantic information; preferences for voices can predict health, fertility, and genetic quality of the speaker, and people often use voice attractiveness, in particular, to make these assessments of others. But it is not known what we think of the attractiveness of our own voices as others hear them. In this study eighty men and women rated the attractiveness of an array of voice recordings of different individuals and were not told that their own recorded voices were included in the presentation. Results showed that participants rated their own voices as sounding more attractive than others had rated their voices, and participants also rated their own voices as sounding more attractive than they had rated the voices of others. These findings suggest that people may engage in vocal implicit egotism, a form of self-enhancement.

The death effect in literary evaluation: reverence for the dead?

It is commonly believed that the value of art and other creative works increases after the death of the artist. In an attempt to examine this so-called death effect we presented a short story to N = 431 undergraduate students asking how much money they would hypothetically spend to purchase a literary work. We experimentally manipulated: 1) whether the author died or moved after publishing a short story, and, 2) the gender of the author. Participants randomly received one of four possible biographical descriptions about the author. We predicted that participants would offer higher purchase prices and subjectively evaluate the work more positively when they believed the author was dead. Results were consistent with this hypothesis perhaps reflecting a certain reverence for the dead. We also found that evaluations of the story were more favorable when the purported gender of the author matched that of the participant.

Validating Measures of Leader Authenticity

Using a student sample in a lab setting, we examined the relationships between explicit and implicit self-esteem and two measures of leader authenticity: self-reported authentic leadership as measured by the Authentic Leadership Questionnaire (ALQ) and perceived leader authenticity as reflected in leadership speeches. In addition, we explored the influence of situational cues for an internal versus external focus on measures of leadership authenticity. Explicit and implicit self-esteem related to authentic leadership in predicted directions, but not perceived leader authenticity. ALQ scores were also positively related to perceived leader authenticity and were significantly affected by the situational cues. Results provide support for the construct validity of the ALQ, while also showing that ALQ scores can be influenced by situational cues promoting an internal versus external focus.