Research
The Surprise of Reaching Out: Appreciated More than We Think
with Peggy J. Liu, SoYon Rim, and Lauren Min, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2023, 124(4), 754-771.
People are fundamentally social beings and enjoy connecting with others, sometimes reaching out to others—whether simply to say hello and to check in on how others are doing with a brief message, or to send a small gift to show that one is thinking of the other person. Yet despite the importance and enjoyment of social connection, do people accurately understand how much other people value being reached out to by someone in their social circle? Across a series of pre-registered experiments, we document a robust underestimation of how much other people appreciate being reached out to. We find evidence compatible with an account wherein one reason this underestimation of appreciation occurs is because responders (vs. initiators) are more focused on their feelings of surprise at being reached out to; such a focus on feelings of surprise in turn predicts greater appreciation. We further identify process-consistent moderators of the underestimation of reach-out appreciation, finding that it is magnified when the reach-out context is more surprising: when it occurs within a surprising (vs. unsurprising) context for the recipient and when it occurs between more socially distant (vs. socially close) others. Altogether, this research thus identifies when and why we underestimate how much other people appreciate us reaching out to them, implicating a heightened focus on feelings of surprise as one underlying explanation.
Reminder Avoidance: Why People Hesitate to Disclose Their Insecurities to Friends
with Soo Kim and Peggy J. Liu, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2021, 121(1), 59-75.
[Supplemental Materials: Web Appendix, Data]
People seek and receive support from friends through self-disclosure. However, when self-disclosures reveal one’s personal insecurities, do people rely on friends as an audience as they normally do? This research demonstrates that they do not. Five pre-registered studies show that disclosers exhibit a weaker preference for friends as an audience when disclosures involve revealing personal insecurities than when they involve revealing other neutral or negative personal information. This effect is observed despite that the only alternative audience available to disclosers in these studies is a stranger. We theorize that such an effect occurs because disclosers anticipate stronger pain associated with being reminded of disclosed contents when their disclosures involve personal insecurities than other types of information and, thus, wish to avoid such reminders from happening. Our findings support this theorizing: (1) Disclosers’ weaker preference for friends as an audience for insecurity-provoking (vs. non-insecurity-provoking) disclosure is mediated by how painful they anticipate reminders of disclosed contents to be and (2) disclosers’ preference for a particular audience is diminished when their perceived likelihood of disclosed-content reminders associated with that audience is enhanced. An additional exploratory content-analysis study shows that when people disclose their personal insecurities, they disclose less and are less intimate in what they disclose when imagining a friend (vs. a stranger) as an audience. Altogether, disclosers are, ironically, found to open up less to friends about their insecurities—self-aspects that may particularly benefit from friends’ support—than about other topics, due to their avoidance of potentially painful disclosed-content reminders.
Where Do You Want to Go for Dinner? A Preference Expression Asymmetry in Joint Consumption
with Peggy J. Liu*, Journal of Marketing Research, 2020, 57(6), 1037-1054.
[Supplementary Materials: Web Appendix, Data]
This research introduces a framework wherein consumers take on “requestor” or “responder” roles in making joint consumption decisions. The authors document a robust preference expression asymmetry wherein “requestors” soliciting others’ consumption preferences (e.g., “Where do you want to go for dinner?”) desire preference expressions (e.g., “Let’s go to this restaurant”), whereas “responders” instead do not express preferences (e.g., “Anywhere is fine with me”). This asymmetry generalizes under a broad set of situations and occurs because the requestor and responder roles differ in their foci. Compared to responders, requestors are more focused on mitigating the difficulty of arriving at a decision, whereas compared to requestors, responders are more focused on conveying likability by appearing easygoing. Responders thus behave suboptimally, incurring a “preference cost” (when masking preferences) and a “social friction cost” (requestors favor responders who express preferences). Requestors can elicit preference expression by conveying their own dislike of decision-making, which increases responders’ focus on mitigating decision difficulty. The authors conclude by discussing the framework’s contributions to looking “under-the-hood” of joint consumption decisions.
with SoYon Rim, Peggy J. Liu, Tanya L. Chartrand, and Yaacov Trope, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2019, 45(3), 360-371.
[Supplementary Materials: Web Appendix]
Gift-giving is a common form of social exchange but little research has examined how different gift types affect the psychological distance between giver and recipient. We examined how two types of gifts influence recipients’ perceived psychological distance to the giver. Specifically, we compared desirable gifts focused on the quality of the gift with feasible gifts focused on the gift’s practicality or ease of use. We found that feasible (vs. desirable) gifts led recipients to feel psychologically closer to givers (Studies 1 – 4). Further clarifying the process by which receiving a desirable versus feasible gift affects perceived distance, when recipients were told that the giver focused on the gift’s practicality or ease of use (vs. the gift’s overall quality), while holding the specific features of the gifts constant, they felt closer to the gift-giver (Study 5). These results shed light on how different gifts can influence interpersonal relationships.
Sharing Extraordinary Experiences Fosters Feelings of Closeness
with Peggy J. Liu* and Soo Kim*, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 2018, 44(1), 107-121.
[Supplemental Materials: Web Appendix, Data]
Every social relationship begins somewhere. Yet, little is known about which initial encounters bring people closer. This paper investigates whether feelings of closeness are shaped by the type of experience shared between two individuals. Using different procedures and stimuli, we find that one determining factor is whether unacquainted individuals initially share a relatively more ordinary or extraordinary experience: more extraordinary (vs. ordinary) experiences facilitate greater closeness between unacquainted individuals (Studies 1a-1c). We also find that this closeness-fostering effect does not occur for interactions between well-acquainted individuals (Study 2), when there is presumably little discomfort associated with the interaction, and that it appears to be driven by the capacity of more extraordinary experiences to absorb individuals’ attention (Study 3). Thus, we suggest that extraordinary experiences might foster feelings of closeness because they direct unacquainted individuals’ attention toward the extraordinariness of the experience and potentially away from the discomfort of initial interactions.
with SoYon Rim*, James S. Uleman, Tanya L. Chartrand, and Donal E. Carlston, Journal of Experimental and Social Psychology, 2013, 49(6), 1204-1209.
People infer traits from other people's behaviors without intention, awareness, or effort, and this spontaneous trait inference (STI) effect has been shown to be robust. The purpose of the present research was to demonstrate the flexibility of STIs despite the ubiquity. Specifically, we examined the effect of an affiliation goal on STI formation and found a positivity bias. In Experiment 1, perceivers with an affiliation goal formed more positive (versus negative) spontaneous trait inferences compared to those without this goal and those who had been primed with semantically positive, affiliation-unrelated words. Experiment 2 provided evidence that this effect was driven by a motivational state by showing that the positivity bias occurs only when a perceiver's goal to affiliate remains unfulfilled. The goal's interaction with trait valence showed focused, goal-relevant bias. These studies are the first to show that STIs form flexibly in response to perceivers' primed social goals supporting the functionality account of STIs in implicit impression formation.
SELECT WORKING PAPERS
Aesthetics During Pre-Interaction: A Preference Asymmetry for Minimalist Versus Maximalist Personal Aesthetics
with Lauren Min, Cary Anderson, and Peggy J. Liu
Life abounds with occasions for forming pre-interaction impressions of others, whether when browsing social media profiles or catching sight of a new neighbor at a block party. Often, these pre-interaction impressions are based on little initial information besides superficial visuals of others’ appearance, including of their personal, easily controllable aesthetics (e.g., their social media profile photo aesthetics, their clothing choices). The present research asks (in non-romantic contexts): do people display personal aesthetics that optimize their interpersonal social attractiveness (i.e., encourage others to approach them) during pre-interaction? Four pre-registered experiments demonstrated an aesthetic preference asymmetry, wherein observers (vs. actors) consistently expressed a greater preference for maximalist (vs. minimalist) personal aesthetics. We find evidence compatible with our theorizing that a differential actor-observer focus on warmth signals underlie these findings, wherein observers are more focused on warmth signals than actors, which they infer are better conveyed by maximalist (vs. minimalist) personal aesthetics.
*equal authorship