Social Knowledge and the “Secret Self”: The Mediating Effect of Data Base Size on Judgments of Emotionality in the Self and Others

Abstract

The research discussed in this article examined possible explanations for the familiarity bias in the estimation of emotionality first identified by Johnson (1987)—the belief that familiar others feel emotions more, but sometimes display them less, than unfamiliar others do. In a between-subjects design, 348 subjects imagined either themselves, a close friend, or a casual acquaintance in a series of brief affect-eliciting situations, then estimated the degree to which the designated person would both feel and display specified emotions. Subjects in the “self-imagine” condition consistently estimated they would feel emotions more intensely than subjects in the “casual-acquaintance-imagine” condition estimated those acquaintances would feel them, and estimations of subjects in the “close-friend-imagine” condition were between these points. Predictions of the extent to which the person would display these same emotions varied less with target figure than did predictions of subjective affect, and estimations ...