Warming Up and Cooling Down: Self-Esteem and Behavioral Responses to Social Threat During Relationship Initiation

Abstract

Social threats during relationship initiation often cause people to engage in cold behaviors that bring about rejection. However, interpersonal risk-regulation theory suggests that such processes will be moderated by global self-esteem. In two experiments that manipulated the threat of rejection, single participants communicated via video camera with an opposite-sex interaction partner (actually a confederate). As expected, social threat caused higher self-esteem individuals (HSEs) to exhibit a warming-up behavioral response but caused lower self-esteem individuals (LSEs) to exhibit a cooling-down behavioral response, according to both observer-reports and self-reports, which in turn led observers to like HSEs more than LSEs. Furthermore, these effects were independent of similar, previously documented, interpersonal risk-regulation effects on participants' perceptions of acceptance from the confederate.