How Does It Feel to Be Outperformed by a “Good Winner”? Prize Sharing and Self-Deprecating as Appeasement Strategies

Winning isn't everything: Guilt proneness and competitive vs. non-competitive motivation

OBJECTIVE

Guilt proneness is associated with both high motivation to succeed and enhanced concern for others. However, in competition, achieving success requires harming others' interests, which demotivates guilt-prone individuals. Given the prevalence of competition in social and professional life, we examine the relation between guilt proneness, general motivation, and competitive motivation.

METHOD

Two experiments and two laboratory studies (N = 1735) measured guilt proneness, general motivation, and competitive motivation, and their effects on competitive preferences and choices. Study settings included students' choice of playing a game individually vs. competitively (Study 1), physicians' likelihood to seek residency in medical fields characterized by high competitiveness (Study 2), amateur athletes' preferences between inclusive and win-oriented team strategies (Study 3), and online workers' evaluations of a hypothetical scenario (Study 4).

RESULTS

Guilt proneness was related positively to general motivation, but negatively to competitive motivation. Guilt proneness, indirectly through lower competitive motivation, predicted a lower likelihood of pursuing competitive paths and preference for non-competitive strategies. Emphasizing prosocial aspects of competitiveness attenuated these effects.

CONCLUSIONS

Guilt proneness is related to high general motivation but to a lower desire to win. Guilt-prone individuals strive for excellence, but through non-competitive paths, whereas people with lower guilt proneness prefer competing.

Impression (mis)management: When what you say is not what they hear

Impression management is a fundamental aspect of social life. From self-promotion to feedback giving, from advice seeking to networking, people frequently find themselves in situations where they need to make a positive impression on others. Despite the long-term benefits of making a favorable impression, impression management attempts can backfire in unintended ways. In this article, I review recent research on self-presentation, social cognition, and communication to explain when and why people have misguided intuitions about their impressions on others, document common impression management mistakes, and propose more effective strategies to minimize actor-target asymmetries in social interactions. This review provides a theoretical framework to understand the psychology of impression (mis)management, as well as the risks and rewards of different self-presentation strategies.

Reconsidering self-deprecation as a communication practice

‘Self‐deprecation’ (SD) is widely understood within social psychology and popular culture as a form of self‐talk that reflects a cognitive state, such as low self‐esteem or negative self‐regard. However, most research on SD suffers theoretical and methodological problems that fail to account for how its cognitive and linguistic aspects can be reconciled. We know little about SD as it occurs in interactional settings. Utilizing a conversation analytic (CA) perspective that brackets cognitive explanations for linguistic phenomena, this paper draws on more than 100 hours of transcribed recordings of interactions from diverse settings to systematically examine the form and function of a common class of SD: critical comments by a speaker on their current talk or actions (self‐deprecatory meta‐comments; SDMCs). Analyses demonstrate that SDMCs are used in environments of possible or actual interactional trouble, and manage this trouble in different sequential positions. The paper shows that SDs can be treated as a communication practice. Rigorous analysis of SDMCs can enrich understanding of the construction of ‘identities’ in talk. It advances a CA understanding of the ascription of social actions, and the preference for self‐criticism over criticism by others. Findings suggest that widespread advice to self‐deprecate less may be invalid.

The self and others in the experience of pride

Pride is seen as both a self-conscious emotion as well as a social emotion. These categories are not mutually exclusive, but have brought forth different ideas about pride as either revolving around the self or as revolving around one's relationship with others. Current measures of pride do not include intrapersonal elements of pride experiences. Social comparisons, which often cause experiences of pride, contain three elements: the self, the relationship between the self and another person, and the other person. From the literature on pride, we distilled three related elements; perceptions and feelings of self-inflation, other-distancing, and other-devaluation. In four studies, we explored whether these elements were present in pride experiences. We did so at an implicit (Experiment 1; N = 218) and explicit level (Experiment 2; N = 125), in an academic setting with in vivo (Experiment 3; N = 203) and imagined pride experiences (Experiment 4; N = 126). The data consistently revealed that the experience of pride is characterised by self-inflation, not by other-distancing nor other-devaluation.