People select feedback to flatter others, except when they dislike them

People generally try to make other people feel good about themselves, but not when they dislike them. That’s the finding of a new study by psychologists at the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) at the Annenberg School for Communication investigating the extent to which people promote “positive self-views” for total strangers.

Previous research has shown that people tend to seek information that helps to enhance their own self-views, but not whether and when they use similar selection processes to improve the way that others see themselves, or for whom.

In the study “Enhancing Others Through Information Selection: Establishing the Phenomenon and Its Preconditions,” Xi Shen, a research associate at the Social Action Lab, which is affiliated with the Annenberg School for Communication and School of Arts & Sciences; Allison Earl, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Michigan; and Dolores Albarracín, the Amy Gutmann Penn Integrates Knowledge University Professor and director of the Social Action Lab as well as APPC’s Communication Science division, offer the first major scientific insight into this important matter of human behavior and motivation.

The researchers conducted a series of experiments in which participants were asked to inform strangers that a personality or intelligence test the others had taken was either valid or invalid. Participants were more likely to inform the test-taker that the test was valid when that person had performed well but invalid when their partner had performed poorly. In other words, they chose to share information that would enhance the other person’s positive self-views. This occurred not only when those doing the selection were unaware of whether the test was valid or invalid, but also when they knew the information was false.

The researchers have found that this preference persisted whether or not test-takers expressed positive or negative views about their personality or intelligence, and whether or not objective information about the test was available—indicating that the motivation to enhance others is quite strong. The researchers also asked some participants about their reasons for choosing the information they did and found that their preference was driven by a desire to please others.

“Our participants’ choices were driven by social considerations—they wanted to enhance other people’s self-images to make their partners feel good. But that was true only when the others were perceived as likable or neutral,” says Shen, the lead author on the study.

Read more at Annenberg Public Policy Center.