Playing Up to Par (Or Not)

When we were talking about Self-Handicapping in class, I was reminded of an old teammate of mine from my high school golf team. She constantly used the Self-Handicapping strategy, which is the idea that people take actions to handicap their own performance, allowing them to have a built-in excuse for their failures and making them look really good in the unlikely event of success (Berglas & Jones, 1978). There are two kinds of Self-Handicapping--"feigned", which is an abstract, imagined excuse for failure (e.g.-falsely claiming to not have studied for a test), and "Behavioral", which are the actual obstacles that people put in their own way that they can use as an excuse (e.g.-drinking the night before a test).

OK, back to my old teammate. We'll call her "Ashley". Ashley was a decent golfer...she was never the best, but she could definitely play well enough to beat a lot of our competitors. But, if you ask her, she never played to her full potential in high school--not even once! She was constantly complaining about either being sick or having back problems (or both). I don't think there was one tournament when she did not have something "wrong" with her that impacted her golf game. To make matters worse, she had one of those Dads who lives vicariously through his kids, so he always completely bought her excuses and egged her on. Thanks to her Dad's encouragement, she sincerely believed that she could play Varsity Golf at UT (which you have to be amazing to be able to do). She ended up playing at a junior college, but I am sure she would be at UT if she hadn't been sick all the time ;) It was a team joke that nobody should ask her how she is doing unless they have a couple hours to spare, because Ashley will take anyone who asks through all of her illnesses and back problems that impede on her golf game. If only she could get her back fixed, I am sure we would have the next Michelle Wie on our hands.............

Berglas, S., & Jones, E. E. (1978). Drug choice as a self-handicapping strategy in response to noncontingent success. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 405-417.

A Pirate's Life for Me

I have always been a movie buff. I love pretty much any type of movie and am willing to see almost anything. There are also certain movies that I absolutely love and watch over and over again. When movies such as these come out in series, I absolutely HAVE TO go to the midnight premieres, which are actually a lot of fun. Pirates of the Caribbean is one such series. I went to the midnight premiere of the 2nd movie (Dead Man's Chest) with some friends and, being the dorks that we were, we actually dressed up as pirates.

I went all out with the full pirate costume--fake gold jewelry, bandana, vest...you get the picture. It was so much fun dressing up and going with my friends (who were also dressed up), but once we actually got to the theater, I started to realize that I kind of looked like an idiot, or at least like a fan that was a little too obsessed...I felt like we were a little overdressed. Most people dressed up to some extent (with bandanas and jewelry), but there was a smaller number of people dressed up as full pirates like we were. Even though everyone knew it was the night of the premiere and there were so many other people dressed up, as soon as I walked into the theater, I felt so self-conscious, as if everyone were staring at just me and not my friends or the countless other people who wore pirate gear. I even felt weird going to buy popcorn and talking to the people working, when they obviously knew why I was dressed up.

My feeling of conspicuousness in the sea of pirates (pun intended) demonstrates the Spotlight Effect (Gilovich, Medvec, & Savitsky, 2000). This is the idea that we believe that the social "spotlight" shines on us more than it actually does. That is, we think people notice us more than they actually do, especially when we feel awkward or self-conscious. Once I sat in the theater and got over the Spotlight Effect of my pirate costume, I managed to have a great time and enjoy the movie. I finally realized that I was not as noticeable as I thought because there were so many other pirate costumes that night. However, if I were the only one dressed up, that might have been a different story...

Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (2000). The spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one’s own actions and appearance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 211-222.

Break-Up Blues

One of my really good friends here at SU, "Amanda", had a high school sweetheart that she had been dating for five whole years. They spent so much time together and they seemed like the perfect couple, to the extent that everyone thought they were eventually going to get married. That is why it was a HUGE surprise when I found out yesterday that he had left Amanda for another girl. Needless to say, all of her friends, especially me, were shocked. Someone even sent her his "condolences", as if someone had died!

Today, I was watching TV with Amanda, who was still pretty shaken up. Much to her dismay, a commercial came on that showed a woman crying and saying that her boyfriend had left her. Ordinarily, we would not have even noticed this commercial, because it was pretty goofy and inconsequential. But, Amanda was primed to notice the commercial because it was related to everything that had been on her mind for the past 24 hours, and she therefore became even more upset. That is, she noticed the commercial because recently acquired information or circumstances tend to come to mind easily and influence the interpretation of new information (Higgins et al., 1977). She told me that, even within just that one day, there had been so many things that reminded her of her ex-boyfriend--she had heard the song that was his ringtone, as well as another song that they both liked, and then this commercial came on that reminded her of the situation all over again. The breakup with her boyfriend was constantly on her mind, so she was more easily reminded of it by things in her environment than she normally would be.

Amanda also fell victim to the primacy effect--the tendency for information presented early in a sequence to have more impact on impressions than information presented later (Asch, 1946). Amanda is a very driven, intelligent person who hopes to be a professor. She is even a Brown scholar at SU, which tells you just how smart she is. When she first met her ex-boyfriend in high school, he was intelligent and fairly motivated as well. They had similar ambitions in life and she saw him as an intellectual equal. However, I did not find out until after they broke up that he had actually gotten kicked out of UT earlier this semester because his grades were too low. She said all he does with his time is play video games and intramural sports. She never mentioned this while they were dating, perhaps because she was able to overlook his recent laziness in favor of his earlier ambition. That is, because her first impressions of him were so positive, she "tuned out" his later behavior, only seeing the motivated person she first started dating five years ago. It was only after they broke up that she was able to see him clearly.

Higgins, E.T., Rholes, W.S., & Jones, C.R. (1977). Category Accessibility and Impression Formation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 13, 141-154.

Asch, S. E. (1946) Forming impressions of personality, Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 41, 258-290