Examined 21 cases in which crowds were present when a disturbed person threatened to jump off a building, bridge, or tower. Baiting or jeering occurred in 10 of the cases. Analysis of newspaper accounts of the episodes suggested several deindividuation factors that might contribute to the baiting phenomenon: membership in a large crowd, the cover of nighttime, and physical distance between crowd and victim (all...

Male undergraduates found themselves in a smoke filled room either alone, with 2 nonreacting others, or in groups of 3. As predicted, Ss were less likely to report the smoke when in the presence of passive others (10%) or in groups of 3 (38% of groups) than when alone (75%). This result seemed to have been mediated by the way Ss interpreted the ambiguous situation;...

Studied divergent perspectives of actors and Os in 3 situations. In Study 1 with 33 female undergraduate actor-O pairs, actors' cooperation with E's request was either elicited or prevented with different monetary incentives while Os watched. Os were found to assume that actors would behave in the future in ways similar to those they had witnessed (actors did not share this assumption). Study 2 found...

The present research aimed to test the cultural generality of the asymmetry in perceptions of interpersonal knowledge (i.e., I-know-you-but-you-do-not-know-me phenomenon) and to explore the perceived behavioral variability of self versus other as a determinant of the asymmetry. In Study 1, the authors found that the asymmetry in beliefs of interpersonal insights was present among Koreans, suggesting a possible cultural universality of the phenomenon. Study 2...

This research provides evidence that people overestimate the extent to which their actions and appearance are noted by others, a phenomenon dubbed the spotlight effect. In Studies 1 and 2, participants who were asked to don a T-shirt depicting either a flattering or potentially embarrassing image overestimated the number of observers who would be able to recall what was pictured on the shirt. In Study...

Researchers have long debated whether knowledge about the self is unique in terms of its functional anatomic representation within the human brain. In the context of memory function, knowledge about the self is typically remembered better than other types of semantic information. But why does this memorial effect emerge? Extending previous research on this topic (see Craik et al., 1999), the present study used event-related...

Conducted 3 experiments using a total of 283 male and female high school students. Exp I demonstrated that the more desirable the self-rating on a personality characteristic, the more central that characteristic is in perceiving others. This self-image bias in person perception was hypothesized to reflect the defense mechanism protecting high self-evaluation. In Exp II it appeared that, consistent with this defense interpretation, there was...

Evidence from four studies demonstrates that social observers tend to perceive a “false consensus” with respect to the relative commonness of their own responses. A related bias was shown to exist in the observers' social inferences. Thus, raters estimated particular responses to be relatively common and relatively unrevealing concerning the actors' distinguishing personal dispositions when the responses in question were similar to the raters' own...

Past research has shown that East Asians are more tolerant of apparent contradiction and tend to accept contradictory beliefs more readily than Americans. The present research examined through three studies whether such a dialectical tendency among East Asians also would be found in beliefs about the self. The results showed that in all three studies, Koreans displayed inconsistent beliefs about the self across contexts more...

Several studies indicate that directional questions influence self-conceptions. For example, subjects asked "are you happy with your social life?" rated themselves as happier than did subjects asked "are you unhappy with your social life?". This occurs because subjects use a positive-test strategy to test directional hypotheses about themselves: Subjects were more likely to search their memories for examples of the hypothesized characteristic than for examples...