Unfavorable Feedback Research Articles

Motivated sensitivity to preference-inconsistent information.

If preference-inconsistent information initiates more effortful cognitive analysis than does preference-consistent information, then people should be more sensitive processors of information they do not want to believe than of information they do want to believe. Three studies supported this prediction. Study 1 found that inferences drawn from favorable interpersonal feedback revealed a correspondence bias, whereas inferences drawn from unfavorable feedback were sensitive to situational constraint. Study 2 showed this sensitivity to the quality of unfavorable feedback to disappear under cognitive load. Study 3 showed that evaluations of the accuracy of favorable medical diagnoses were insensitive to the probability of alternative explanation, whereas evaluations of unfavorable diagnoses were sensitive to probability information. The importance of adaptive considerations in theories of motivated reasoning is discussed.

Self-verification in clinical depression: The desire for negative evaluation.

Do clinically depressed individuals seek favorable or unfavorable information about the self? Self-verification theory makes the counterintuitive prediction that depressed individuals solicit feedback that confirms their negative self-views. To test this prediction, participants were classified on the basis of a structured clinical interview and self-report measures into high-esteem, low self-esteem, and depressed groups. All participants were offered a choice between receiving favorable or unfavorable feedback; 82% of the depressed participants chose the unfavorable feedback, compared to 64% of the low self-esteem participants and 25% of the high self-esteem participants. Additional evidence indicated that depressed individuals also failed to exploit fully an opportunity to acquire favorable evaluations that were self-verifying. The authors discuss how seeking negative evaluations and failing to seek favorable evaluations may help maintain depression.

Self-verification in clinical depression: the desire for negative evaluation.

Do clinically depressed individuals seek favorable or unfavorable information about the self? Self-verification theory makes the counterintuitive prediction that depressed individuals solicit feedback that confirms their negative self-views. To test this prediction, participants were classified on the basis of a structured clinical interview and self-report measures into high-esteem, low self-esteem, and depressed groups. All participants were offered a choice between receiving favorable or unfavorable feedback; 82% of the depressed participants chose the unfavorable feedback, compared to 64% of the low self-esteem participants and 25% of the high self-esteem participants. Additional evidence indicated that depressed individuals also failed to exploit fully an opportunity to acquire favorable evaluations that were self-verifying. The authors discuss how seeking negative evaluations and failing to seek favorable evaluations may help maintain depression.

Perceived Accuracy of Favorable and Unfavorable Psychological Feedback

Seventy-nine college students completed a personality inventory and then received a bogus psychological profile that included a highly self-descriptive personality description and a diagnosis based on that description. The personality description was identical for all participants. The diagnostic information varied across two dimensions. Half the subjects received favorable diagnostic feedback indicating that they were particularly resistant to future problems; the other half received unfavorable diagnostic feedback indicating that they were particularly prone to future problems. Half the subjects received information indicating that they were resistant (of prone) to future medical problems; the other half were told that they were resistant (of prone) to future psychological problems. Subjects in a control condition received the personality description with no diagnostic information. Compared to those in favorable feedback conditions, subjects in unfavorable feedback conditions (a) rated both their diagnoses and the overall personality description as less accurate, (b) generated fewer reasons to support the accuracy of their diagnoses, and (c) generated more reasons to support the inaccuracy of their diagnosis. Favorable- and unfavorable-feedback participants did not differ in the perceived accuracy of the individual statements making up the personality description, although unfavorable-feedback subjects remembered fewer' past behavioral instances consistent with the statements. Both theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.

Student Derogation of the Scholastic Aptitude Test: Biases in Perceptions and Presentations of College Board Scores

A consistent finding in laboratory research is that individuals are quite adept at dismissing and disavowing unfavorable feedback. Three studies extend this research to a nonlaboratory setting by examining how students who receive relatively low scores on the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) respond to this failure feedback. Studies 1 and 2 revealed biases in both perceptions and presentations of test scores. Students with lower SAT scores regarded their score as invalid and also believed that a higher score would be more accurate. This was true even though actual SAT scores significantly predicted current college grade-point average (GPA), whereas the scores subjects estimated would be accurate did not. In addition, when reporting their SAT scores, students systematically inflated them, reporting scores higher than those they actually received. Study 3 suggests that the misreporting of SAT scores is attributable partly, but not entirely, to impression management.

Allure of negative feedback: self-verification strivings among depressed persons.

We propose that people with negative self-views are rejected because they gravitate to partners who view them unfavorably. In relation to nondepressed college students (n = 28), depressives (n = 13) preferred interaction partners who evaluated them unfavorably (Study 1). Similarly, in relation to nondepressives (n = 106), depressives (n = 10) preferred friends or dating partners who evaluated them unfavorably (Study 2). Dysphorics (n = 6) were more inclined to seek unfavorable feedback from their roommates than were nondepressives (n = 16); feedback-seeking activities of dysphorics were also associated with later rejection (Study 3). Finally, people with negative self-views (n = 37) preferentially solicited unfavorable feedback, although receiving such feedback made them unhappy, in comparison with people with positive self-views (n = 42; Study 4). It seems a desire for self-verification compels people with negative self-views to seek unfavorable appraisals.

The Use of Consensus-Raising Excuses as a Function of the Manipulation of Publicness

The present investigation tested the proposition that people use consensus-raising excuses less when they expect to discuss their responses with an informed audience than when they expect to reveal their responses to such an audience without discussion or keep their responses private. Subjects received favorable or unfavorable feedback on an ego-involving social perceptiveness test and made attributions to ability, effort, luck, and task difficulty while expecting to keep their responses private or expecting to reveal them publicly either with or without interaction with an informed audience. Attributions to task difficulty are considered consensus-raising excuses. The results supported the hypothesis.

Agreeable fancy or disagreeable truth? Reconciling self-enhancement and self-verification.

Three studies asked why people sometimes seek positive feedback (self-enhance) and sometimes seek subjectively accurate feedback (self-verify). Consistent with self-enhancement theory, people with low self-esteem as well as those with high self-esteem indicated that they preferred feedback pertaining to their positive rather than negative self-views. Consistent with self-verification theory, the very people who sought favorable feedback pertaining to their positive self-conceptions sought unfavorable feedback pertaining to their negative self-views, regardless of their level of global self-esteem. Apparently, although all people prefer to seek feedback regarding their positive self-views, when they seek feedback regarding their negative self-views, they seek unfavorable feedback. Whether people self-enhance or self-verify thus seems to be determined by the positivity of the relevant self-conceptions rather than their level of self-esteem or the type of person they are.

Effects of impaired hearing and favorable vs. unfavorable personal feedback on negative emotional reactions.

Eighty college females listened to one of four taped conversations, which they were led to believe were personality evaluations of themselves. The content of the evaluations varied in feedback, which described either strengths or weaknesses in adjustment, and in form, in that each recording was either completely intelligible or partially unintelligible to simulate normal and impaired hearing, respectively. The emotional reactivity of the subjects was assessed with several psychometric instruments once before and again immediately after they listened to the tapes; the pre/post difference scores reflected the negative emotions elicited by the experimental manipulations. Factorial analyses of variance yielded significant main effects for each variable, hearing and feedback, but no interaction. Anxiety, depression, negative attribution, and paranoid reactions were increased by both impaired hearing and unfavorable feedback, and their adverse effects were independent and additive.

Reactions to Objective and Subjective Interpersonal Evaluation: The Influence of Social Anxiety

High- and low-social-anxiety individuals' reactions to evaluative feedback were investigated. Subjects made accuracy ratings, attributions, and affective responses to feedback on test performance and an evaluation by a psychologist. The results provide support for both self-consistency and self-esteem notions, albeit in separate response domains. Significant interactions between social anxiety and evaluation valence were uncovered on two measures of cognitive responses. Subjects high in social anxiety rated favorable feedback as less accurate, and favorable evaluators as less perceptive, than subjects low in social anxiety Results on the affective measures, however, revealed that high-social-anxiety subjects were less happy with unfavorable feedback than their low-social-anxiety counterparts. The results are discussed in terms of the self-concept of the socially anxious individual, the differential impact of subjective and objective feedback, and implications for clinical intervention.

Information processing and feedback: Effects of mood and information favorability on the cognitive processing of personally relevant information

Although the cognitive processing of personally relevant feedback appears to be an important clinical issue, previous research has generally not examined this process. The present study presented a theoretical framework for conceptualizing the cognitive processing of feedback and employed this framework to investigate the influence of mood and feedback favorability upon feedback processing. Generally, it was proposed that in order for feedback to be understood and assimilated it must be processed “deeply,” where depth refers to the amont of cognitive analysis that the feedback receives. Using both reaction time and feedback recall to examine depth of processing, results indicated that unfavorable feedback is processed deeply when individuals are primed by a prior negative mood experience. Prior priming by a positive mood experience did not appear to have similar processing effects upon favorable feedback. Implications of these results for psychotherapy were discussed.

Barnum Meets the Computer: A Critical Test

The effects of type of assessment device (computer vs. human) on subjects' acceptance of a favorable or unfavorable personality feedback were investigated. Forty-four French-speaking subjects were administered a fictitious personality questionnaire and were asked to evaluate how appropriate the personality feedback was as a description of themselves and people in general. Contrary to predictions, there was no interaction between the type of assessment device and the favorability factors. Two previous findings were nevertheless replicated: (a) in all conditions the favorable description was better accepted than the unfavorable one and, (b) subjects rated the favorable description as being more appropriate for themselves than for people in general.

Self-consciousness, outcome expectancy, and persistence

A study investigated persistence as a function of two variables: the disposition to be self-attentive (called private self-consciousness) and outcome feedback on a prior task that was described as closely related to the target task. More specifically, subjects first completed a concealed-figures test and were told that their performances were either very good or very poor. The second test, which ostensibly measured the same abilities, was an insolvable design problem that is commonly used to measure persistence. Feedback concerning prior outcomes had a direct influence on expectancies for the second task, but persistence on that task was a joint function of feedback and self-consciousness. That is, favorable feedback led to greater persistence than did unfavorable feedback, but only among subjects high in self-consciousness. This finding replicates and extends the results of several previous studies. Discussion centers on the relationship between the present research and an earlier experiment which yielded apparently different results.

Self-consciousness, self-attention, and social interaction.

Two experiments were conducted to test the effects of self-focused attention on positive and negative social interactions. In the first study, the behavior of dispositionally high and low publicly self-conscious women was examined in an interpersonal situation involving rejection by a group. It was hypothesized that persons high in self-consciou sness, being more aware of how they are perceived by others, would be more sensitive and react more negatively to the rejection than those low in self-consciou sness. The predictions were confirmed. In Experiment 2, female subjects were presented with favorable or unfavorable feedback in the context of an interview, and self-attention was experimentally manipulated by exposing half the subjects to their images in a mirror. Self-awareness increased the negative response to the negative evaluation and tended to increase the positivity of the positive evaluation. The implications of selfawareness theory for the social self and social interaction are discussed. Everyday observations as well as theoretical approaches to social behavior suggest that in the presence of others, one is apt to become self-conscious, that is, aware of the self as a social object that can be observed and evaluated by others. Goffman (1959) has argued quite persuasively that when one is attending to and involved in an ongoing interaction,

Sex differences in the generalization of attraction

The effects of intergroup evaluations on intragroup attraction were assessed in a situation involving two-person teams that were all of the same sex. Male (N=123) and female (N=118) group members separately reported their political views to another dyad and then received either unfavorable, favorable, or no feedback regarding their team as a whole on the basis of this information. The results indicated that females evidenced more anger in response to the out-group's unfavorable feedback than did males. These anger responses were related to attraction to ward a teammate for males but not for females. Moreover, males evidenced less attraction toward an in-group member after receiving unfavorable rather than favorable intergroup evaluations, whereas females did not. On the other hand, only for females was attraction to ward a teammate related to the perceived similarity of that individual within experimental conditions. Apparently, the greater cognitive orientation of females as compared to males to ward another ingroup member resulted in their being less susceptable to the influence of situationally induced affect.

Cognitive dissonance as a function of self-esteem and logical inconsistency.

SummaryAn experiment was conducted to test the importance of self‐esteem in the arousal of cognitive dissonance. Recently, Aronson (1969) suggested that the reason an attitude‐discrepant speech can arouse dissonance is that it is an indecent act committed by an individual who likes to think of himself as a good and decent person. Looking at counterattitudinal behavior as a discrepancy with one's self‐concept rather than as a logical discrepancy between behavioral and attitudinal cognitions differs from Festinger and Carlsnuth's (1959) original notion In the experiment reported, subjects volunteered to take a personality inventory and received either neutral, very favorable, or very unfavorable feedback In this way, subjects' level of self‐esteem was raised or lowered Following this procedure, subjects were induced to record a speech that was known to be discrepant with their private beliefs. They were offered either a small or a large inducement for their statements. It was predicted that, regardless of their level of self‐esteem, subjects would manifest the inverse relationship between incentive magnitude and attitude change predicted by dissonance theory The major analysis of the results, and the concomitant internal analysis, generally supported the prediction With one qualification, the results were held to be consistent with Festinger and Carlsmith's version of dissonance arousal and inconsistent with the self‐esteem analysis