When modesty prevails: Differential favorability of self-presentation to friends and strangers.

Although most interpersonal interactions take place between people who know each other, most self-presentation research has focused on self-presentation to strangers. Five studies showed that self-presentational favorability differed as a function of whether the interaction partner was a friend or a stranger. Studies 1 and 2 found that self-presentations to friends were consistently more modest than self-presentations to strangers. In Studies 3 and 4, self-presentations were manipulated by instructing participants to present themselves in either a self-enhancing or modest manner. Modesty with strangers and self-enhancement with friends both resulted in impaired recall for the interaction, consistent with the view that those strategies contradict familiar, overlearned patterns. Study 5 distinguished self-deprecation from modesty. Taken together, the results indicate that people habitually use different self-presentation strategies with different audiences, relying on favorable self-enhancement with strangers but shifting toward modesty when among friends. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Empathic accuracy in the interactions of male friends versus male strangers.

In unstructured interactions, male friends were found to be more accurate than male strangers in inferring each other's thoughts and feelings. Plausible reasons for this difference were that friends (1) interacted more and exchanged more information, (2) had more similar personalities and therefore more rapport with each other, and (3) had more detailed knowledge of each other's lives. Data confirmed that the friends did indeed interact more and were more similar in their sociability than the strangers; however, these differences did not account for the friends' greater empathic accuracy. Instead, this was primarily attributable to a difference in knowledge structures, namely, the friends' ability to accurately read their partners' thoughts and feelings about imagined events in another place or time. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Accuracy in perceptions of interpersonal interactions: Effects of dysphoria, friendship, and similarity.

Addressed conflicting views of depressives' interpersonal accuracy in an investigation of the accuracy of mild depressives (dysphorics) across differing social contexts. Women who were either friends or strangers and who were either similar or dissimilar in level of dysphoria conversed about 3 topics: a neutral topic, their own disclosure of a personal problem, and their partner's disclosure. Dysphorics were not more accurate in general than nondysphorics. After self-disclosure, all women more accurately detected sympathy from a similar stranger. After the partner's disclosure, women also better detected the mood of a similar partner. When interacting with nondysphoric strangers, however, dysphorics underestimated their partner's sympathy toward them. Implications for cognitive and interpersonal theories of depression and for depressives' relationships are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Depressive behavior in adult monkeys following separation from family environment.

Studied the reactions of 10 nuclear family-reared young adult rhesus monkeys to separation from their families. Ss housed with friends during family separation were relatively unaffected by the separation, as were Ss housed with both friends and strangers. However, Ss individually housed following family removal exhibited depressivelike behaviors previously observed only in infant monkeys separated from mother and/or peers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Real and perceived attitude agreement in social networks.

It is often asserted that friends and acquaintances have more similar beliefs and attitudes than do strangers; yet empirical studies disagree over exactly how much diversity of opinion exists within local social networks and, relatedly, how much awareness individuals have of their neighbors' views. This article reports results from a network survey, conducted on the Facebook social networking platform, in which participants were asked about their own political attitudes, as well as their beliefs about their friends' attitudes. Although considerable attitude similarity exists among friends, the results show that friends disagree more than they think they do. In particular, friends are typically unaware of their disagreements, even when they say they discuss the topic, suggesting that discussion is not the primary means by which friends infer each other's views on particular issues. Rather, it appears that respondents infer opinions in part by relying on stereotypes of their friends and in part by projecting their own views. The resulting gap between real and perceived agreement may have implications for the dynamics of political polarization and theories of social influence in general. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Motivational bases of the public goods problem.

Compared 2 motivational bases for not contributing to a public good, desire to "free ride" (or greed) and fear of being a "sucker," among 110 Japanese undergraduates. It was hypothesized that these 2 types of motivation would be activated under different situations. When a public good was provided conjunctively, fear would have a strong effect but greed would not; when a public good was disjunctively provided, greed would have a strong effect but fear would not. In addition, it was predicted that the greater mutual trust existing among friends would make them contribute more than strangers would in the conjunctive condition but would make no difference in the disjunctive condition. Three types of production rules, in which a public good was conjunctively, disjunctively, or additively produced on the basis of members' contributions, were experimentally created. Half of the groups in each condition consisted of total strangers, and the other half consisted of friends. The hypotheses were supported when the size of the public good (bonus points) was relatively large. Also, Ss responded similarly in the conjunctive condition and in the additive condition. (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Culture and the role of choice in agency.

Three cross-cultural studies conducted among U.S. and Indian adults compared perceptions of helping friends in strongly versus weakly expected cases, views of helping family versus strangers, and responses to a self-determination motivation scale. Expectations to help family and friends were positively correlated with satisfaction and choice only among Indians and not among Americans. Also, whereas U.S. respondents associated lesser satisfaction and choice with strongly versus weakly socially expected helping, Indian respondents associated equal satisfaction and choice with the 2 types of cases. Providing evidence of the importance of choice in collectivist cultures, the results indicate that social expectations to meet the needs of family and friends tend to be more fully internalized among Indians than among Americans. Methodologically, the results also highlight the need to incorporate items that tap more internalized meanings of role-related social expectations on measures of motivation in the tradition of self-determination theory. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Everyday lies in close and casual relationships.

In 2 diary studies, 77 undergraduates and 70 community members recorded their social interactions and lies for a week. Because lying violates the openness and authenticity that people value in their close relationships, we predicted (and found) that participants would tell fewer lies per social interaction to the people to whom they felt closer and would feel more uncomfortable when they did lie to those people. Because altruistic lies can communicate caring, we also predicted (and found) that relatively more of the lies told to best friends and friends would be altruistic than self-serving, whereas the reverse would be true of lies told to acquaintances and strangers. Also consistent with predictions, lies told to closer partners were more often discovered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mind-Reading Accuracy in Intimate Relationships: Assessing the Roles of the Relationship, the Target, and the Judge.

Using a video-review procedure, multiple perceivers carried out mind-reading tasks of multiple targets at different levels of acquaintanceship (50 dating couples, friends of the dating partners, and strangers). As predicted, the authors found that mind-reading accuracy was (a) higher as a function of increased acquaintanceship, (b) relatively unaffected by target effects, (c) influenced by individual differences in perceivers' ability, and (d) higher for female than male perceivers. In addition, superior mind-reading accuracy (for dating couples and friends) was related to higher relationship satisfaction, closeness, and more prior disclosure about the problems discussed, but only under moderating conditions related to sex and relationship length. The authors conclude that the nature of the relationship between the perceiver and the target occupies a pivotal role in determining mind-reading accuracy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effects of group cohesiveness on social loafing and social compensation.

Individuals often engage in social loafing, exerting less effort on collective rather than individual tasks. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that social loafing can be reduced or eliminated when individuals work in cohesive rather than noncohesive groups. In Experiment 1, secretarial students typed both individually and collectively in simulated word-processing pools composed of either friends or strangers. In Experiment 2, dyads composed of either friends or strangers worked either coactively or collectively on an idea-generation task. Both studies supported the group cohesiveness hypothesis. Experiment 2 also suggested that individuals tend to engage in social compensation when working with coworkers who are low in ability. These findings are discussed in relation to S. J. Karau and K. D. Williams's (1993) Collective Effort Model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Who knows what about a person? The self–other knowledge asymmetry (SOKA) model.

This article tests a new model for predicting which aspects of personality are best judged by the self and which are best judged by others. Previous research suggests an asymmetry in the accuracy of personality judgments: Some aspects of personality are known better to the self than others and vice versa. According to the self–other knowledge asymmetry (SOKA) model presented here, the self should be more accurate than others for traits low in observability (e.g., neuroticism), whereas others should be more accurate than the self for traits high in evaluativeness (e.g., intellect). In the present study, 165 participants provided self-ratings and were rated by 4 friends and up to 4 strangers in a round-robin design. Participants then completed a battery of behavioral tests from which criterion measures were derived. Consistent with SOKA model predictions, the self was the best judge of neuroticism-related traits, friends were the best judges of intellect-related traits, and people of all perspectives were equally good at judging extraversion-related traits. The theoretical and practical value of articulating this asymmetry is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interactional synchrony: A reappraisal.

The probabilities of observing interactional synchrony (i.e., the precise coordination of body movement boundaries between interactants) were determined for all combinations of 2 or more people in a single 6-person discussion group (3 males and 3 females) comprising friends and strangers. It was found, using the binomial test, that only 1 dyad out of 57 comparisons showed significantly more synchrony than expected by chance. The hypothesis predicting more synchrony between friends than between stranger pairings was not supported. Also, the expectation that at speaker-switching locations, synchrony would be greater between consecutive-speaker than between speaker–listener pairings was not confirmed. However, a latency effect was significant; more synchrony was observed at switching locations where the interval of silence between contributions by successive speakers was 0–.5 sec than when overlapping speech occurred. Even this result was equivocal, since the observed probabilities of synchrony at all switching locations were not significantly different from chance occurrence. Previous studies emphasizing the dependence of human communication on interactional synchrony are questioned. (40 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Androgyny and leadership in mixed-sex groups.

An investigation of individual differences in psychological androgyny showed that they interacted with situational variables to alter the balance of leadership between 107 men and 107 women undergraduates in small-group discussions, as predicted. Each group was composed of either all androgynous or all sex-typed members. The 9 leadership measures represented process (e.g., minutes of speaking time), content (e.g., number of substantive suggestions), and peer impressions (e.g., leadership ratings). Results indicate that when dyads were reminded about their gender role beliefs before the discussion, androgynous men and women shared leadership more and sex-typed partners less than comparable dyads without reminder, in which men dominated regardless of androgyny. Providing social support by increasing group size from dyads to tetrads (2 men, 2 women) also increased leadership sharing between androgynous men and women and increased male dominance in sex-typed groups. Androgynous and sex-typed friends were more active than strangers but did not differ from comparable strangers in leadership-sharing patterns. Peer recognition of leadership followed behavior only roughly. Some behavioral differences were unrecognized; some differences that did not exist were reported. (37 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-monitoring and control in dyadic interactions.

Examined individual differences in the level of planning and monitoring involved in actual interpersonal interactions between pairs of friends and strangers, as measured by a self-monitoring scale (SMS) developed by M. Snyder (see record 1975-03047-001). 18 male–male, 18 male–female, and 18 female–female undergraduate dyads of friends or strangers conversed for 10 min and completed a questionnaire (rating their behavior and feelings in the interaction) and the SMS. Findings reveal that the original unitary SMS was a poor predictor of Ss' perceptions of the interaction, whereas an analysis based on 3 subscales suggested by previous research (e.g., S. R. Briggs et al [see PA, Vol 65:9212]) not only successfully predicted the Ss' perceptions but also explained the failure of the unitary scale. The subscales frequently operated in opposite directions to one another, so that although the individual subscales were able to predict aspects of Ss' perceptions quite well, when the scores were amalgamated into a single overall score this predictive power was lost. It is concluded that the subscales derived from the SMS provided a better explanation of Ss' perceptions of their interactions. (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Preadolescents' and adolescents' online communication and their closeness to friends.

The 1st goal of this study was to investigate how online communication is related to the closeness of existing friendships. Drawing from a sample of 794 preadolescents and adolescents, the authors found that online communication was positively related to the closeness of friendships. However, this effect held only for respondents who primarily communicated online with existing friends and not for those who mainly talked with strangers. The 2nd goal was to refine 2 opposing hypotheses, the rich-get-richer and the social compensation hypotheses. Consistent with the rich-get-richer hypothesis, socially anxious respondents communicated online less often than did nonsocially anxious respondents. However, socially anxious respondents perceived the Internet as more valuable for intimate self-disclosure than did nonsocially anxious respondents, and this perception in turn led to more online communication. This result is consistent with the social compensation hypothesis. Online communication and closeness to friends increased with age. There was a curvilinear relationship between age and perceived value of the Internet for intimate self-disclosure, such that 15-year-olds were at the epitome of online self-disclosure. Girls were closer to friends and more socially anxious than were boys. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Multiple audience problem: A strategic communication perspective on social perception.

Examined how communicators send mixed messages containing an explicit surface content and a covert hidden content. In Study 1, Ss wrote constrained essays presenting either an introverted or extraverted personality. Although authors reported manipulating essay credibility and readers reported relying on credibility to make their judgments, readers succumbed to correspondence bias. In Studies 2 and 3, Ss again prepared either constrained essays (Study 2) or constrained videotapes (Study 3) and included in them a hidden message that would be understood by only their friends but not by strangers. Observers then read these essays or watched these videotapes. Friends detected and decoded the hidden messages, whereas strangers did not. We discuss these findings in terms of social perception and strategic communication. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Openers: Individuals who elicit intimate self-disclosure.

Presents an "Opener Scale" that measures the tendency to elicit intimate disclosure from others. Data from 740 undergraduates provided evidence for the scale's validity and reliability. In a face-to-face dyadic interaction between strangers in a laboratory study, 55 undergraduate women who scored either high or low on the Opener Scale were paired with other women who scored either high or low on a self-disclosure index. Low disclosers revealed more to high openers than to low openers. However, high disclosers were equally intimate with both types of partner. In a field study with 54 sorority women, acquaintances and friends were more willing to disclose to high openers than to low openers. High openers were more liked than low openers in the latter study only. It is suggested that high openers were able to elicit more disclosure because of their greater receptiveness and attentiveness and use of more follow-up questions. (44 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Strangers, travelers, and Greyhound terminals: A study of small-scale helping behaviors.

Four questions designed to elicit helping behaviors were posed to 646 adult strangers in 120 bus terminals throughout the US. American and Australian experimenters (Es) tested whether familiar strangers (fellow bus travelers) would help more than total strangers and whether helping effects were influenced by nationality. Results indicate that Australian and American females, but not male American Es, were helped more by familiar strangers. Chi-square analyses also demonstrated an interaction effect between E's sex, nationality, and familiar–total stranger helping. The findings for Australian Es are considered to be consequences of a particular social role, labeled "foreign tourist," which legitimizes help-seeking behavior. (18 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The relationship between heart rate reactivity, emotionally aggressive behavior, and general violence in batterers.

This study examined the relationships among physiological responses during marital conflict, aggressive behavior, and violence in battering couples. As an index of physiological response, the authors used the male batterer's heart rate reactivity, assessed as the change from an eyes-closed baseline to the first 5 min of their marital conflict interaction. During marital interaction, violent husbands who lowered their heart rates below baseline levels were more verbally aggressive toward their wives. Wives responded to these men with anger, sadness, and defensiveness. The husbands were classified as Type 1 batterers. When compared to the remaining violent husbands (classified as Type 2 batterers), Type 1 men were also more violent toward others (friends, strangers, coworkers, and bosses), had more elevated scales reflecting antisocial behavior and sadistic aggression, and were lower on dependency than Type 2 men. The 2-year followup revealed a separation-divorce rate of 0 for marriages involving Type 1 men and a divorce rate of 27.5% for marriages involving Type 2 men. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Engaging strangers in proximal interaction: Infants' social initiative.

Observed 72 infants aged 12, 18, and 24 mo in the presence of their mothers and 2 adult female strangers to assess their willingness to initiate proximal interaction (PI) with unfamiliar adults. Mothers and strangers were asked to be warmly responsive to infant overtures but not to invite interaction from the infant. A majority of the infants at the 3 ages initiated PI with one or both strangers, often repeatedly. For those who engaged in 2 or more PI bouts with the strangers, a significant upward trend in bout duration and intensity was noted. Older infants gave more toys to the strangers and initiated more mutual play. Stranger–mother distance affected amount of proximity, not PI. Mother–stranger conversation was associated with less PI with the conversing stranger. At all ages infants sought more PI with their mothers than with the strangers. Although infants initiated an appreciable amount of PI with the strangers during the 40-min observation, comparison with other studies indicates that a stranger who takes the initiative by inviting play can establish more rapport much sooner. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)