Abraham Tesser

Last updated
Abraham Tesser
Born
Abraham Tesser

(1941-05-24)24 May 1941
Nationality American
Alma mater Purdue University (PhD, 1967)
Scientific career
Fields psychology, Social psychology
Institutions University of Georgia

Abraham Tesser' [1] (born May 24, 1941, Brooklyn, NY) is Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus of Psychology at the University of Georgia. His research has made significant contributions to several areas in the field of Social Psychology. He created the self-evaluation maintenance model, a theory in social psychology that focuses on the motives for self-enhancement.

Contents

Biography

Abraham Tesser received a BA from Long Island University in 1962 and an MS in 1965 and PhD in 1967 from Purdue University. He is now a Distinguished Research Professor Emeritus from the University of Georgia where he held a faculty position (1967-1999) and directed the Institute for Behavioral Research (1984-1994). His research has been supported by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute for Mental Health. He served in the field of social psychology as president in 2000 of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology and as Editor of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. His major research contributions have been in the areas of interpersonal communication, attitudes and the psychology of self.

Research

Interpersonal Communication: The Mum Effect

This research, [2] in collaboration with Sidney Rosen, identified (and named) a robust tendency for persons to avoid communicating information with negative consequences (bad news) to the relevant recipient. A variety of explanations for the effect has been explored and reported.

Attitudes

Self-Generated attitude change (attitude polarization). This research [3] suggests that simply thinking about an attitude object, even with no new information or change in circumstances, can result in attitude change usually in a more extreme direction (polarization). Such changes seem to depend on the presence of cognitive schemas. [4]
Attitudes and Behavior. The Mismatch Model. Self-reported attitudes might primarily reflect a person’s feelings or her beliefs about an attitude object Her behavior with respect to the object might also primarily reflect feelings about the object, i.e., consummatory behaviors, or beliefs about the object, i.e., instrumental behaviors. According to the Mismatch Model the relationship between attitudes and behavior is maximized when there is a match between the attitude component reflected in the self-report and the component reflected in the behavior. [5]
Attitude Heritability. Attitudes differ in the extent to which they are influenced by genetic factors, i.e., their heritability. Attitudes with greater heritability are more accessible, more resistant to social influence and more influential in attracting/repelling us to/from others. [6]

The Psychology of Self

The Self-evaluation maintenance theory [7] posits two processes, the comparison process and the reflection process, to explain how the outstanding performance of others can affect our own behavior. When a close other, e.g., a friend or relative, performs better in a highly self-relevant domain then self-evaluation is likely to suffer by comparison. If the performance domain is low in self-relevance then the reflection process is likely to be more important and the outstanding performance of a friend or relative boost self-evaluation. Assume that people want to maintain a positive self-evaluation. Now, predictions can be tested about when people will alter the self-relevance of a performance domain, how close (or distant) they will feel toward another, and whether they will facilitate or hinder the performance of another. The emotions underlying these behavioral changes have also been explored. The model has been extended to recognize the effects of committed relationships, e.g., marriage, by Stephen Beach. [8]
Confluence and the Self Zoo. The number of processes that affect self-esteem is large and diverse, a "self zoo" . Using three broad classes of mechanisms, cognitive consistency, social comparison and value expression, the "confluence" work shows that many of these mechanisms are not independent. For example, a threat to self-esteem via social comparison can be addressed via increases in cognitive consistency or value expression and vice versa [9]

Related Research Articles

Social psychology Study of social effects on peoples thoughts, feelings, and behaviors

Social psychology is the scientific study of how the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors of individuals are influenced by the presence of others as well as the internalized social norms that humans are influenced by, even when alone. Social psychologists typically explain human behavior as a result of the relationship between mental state and social situation, studying the social conditions under which thoughts, feelings, and behaviors occur and how these variables influence social interactions.

Self-esteem is an individual's subjective evaluation of their own worth. Self-esteem encompasses beliefs about oneself as well as emotional states, such as triumph, despair, pride, and shame. Smith and Mackie (2007) defined it by saying "The self-concept is what we think about the self; self-esteem, is the positive or negative evaluations of the self, as in how we feel about it."

Cognitive dissonance Stress from contradictory beliefs

In the field of psychology, cognitive dissonance is the perception of contradictory information. Relevant items of information include a person's actions, feelings, ideas, beliefs, values, and things in the environment. Cognitive dissonance is typically experienced as psychological stress when persons participate in an action that goes against one or more of those things. According to this theory, when two actions or ideas are not psychologically consistent with each other, people do all in their power to change them until they become consistent. The discomfort is triggered by the person's belief clashing with new information perceived, wherein the individual tries to find a way to resolve the contradiction to reduce their discomfort.

Job satisfaction Attitude of a person towards work

Job satisfaction, employee satisfaction or work satisfaction is a measure of workers' contentedness with their job, whether they like the job or individual aspects or facets of jobs, such as nature of work or supervision. Job satisfaction can be measured in cognitive (evaluative), affective, and behavioral components. Researchers have also noted that job satisfaction measures vary in the extent to which they measure feelings about the job. or cognitions about the job.

In psychology, attitude is a psychological construct, a mental and emotional entity that inheres in or characterizes a person. They are complex and are an acquired state through experiences. It is an individual's predisposed state of mind regarding a value and it is precipitated through a responsive expression towards oneself, a person, place, thing, or event which in turn influences the individual's thought and action. Most simply understood attitudes in psychology are the feelings individuals have about themselves and the world. Prominent psychologist Gordon Allport described this latent psychological construct as "the most distinctive and indispensable concept in contemporary social psychology." Attitude can be formed from a person's past and present. Key topics in the study of attitudes include attitude strength, attitude change, consumer behavior, and attitude-behavior relationships.

Self-perception theory Account of attitude formation developed by psychologist Daryl Bem

Self-perception theory (SPT) is an account of attitude formation developed by psychologist Daryl Bem. It asserts that people develop their attitudes by observing their own behavior and concluding what attitudes must have caused it. The theory is counterintuitive in nature, as the conventional wisdom is that attitudes determine behaviors. Furthermore, the theory suggests that people induce attitudes without accessing internal cognition and mood states. The person interprets their own overt behaviors rationally in the same way they attempt to explain others' behaviors.

Self-knowledge is a term used in psychology to describe the information that an individual draws upon when finding an answer to the question "What am I like?".

Attitudes are associated beliefs and behaviors towards some object. They are not stable, and because of the communication and behavior of other people, are subject to change by social influences, as well as by the individual's motivation to maintain cognitive consistency when cognitive dissonance occurs—when two attitudes or attitude and behavior conflict. Attitudes and attitude objects are functions of affective and cognitive components. It has been suggested that the inter-structural composition of an associative network can be altered by the activation of a single node. Thus, by activating an affective or emotional node, attitude change may be possible, though affective and cognitive components tend to be intertwined.

Ambivalence is a state of having simultaneous conflicting reactions, beliefs, or feelings towards some object. Stated another way, ambivalence is the experience of having an attitude towards someone or something that contains both positively and negatively valenced components. The term also refers to situations where "mixed feelings" of a more general sort are experienced, or where a person experiences uncertainty or indecisiveness.

Social comparison theory Theory in social psychology

Social comparison theory, initially proposed by social psychologist Leon Festinger in 1954, centers on the belief that there is a drive within individuals to gain accurate self-evaluations. The theory explains how individuals evaluate their own opinions and abilities by comparing themselves to others in order to reduce uncertainty in these domains, and learn how to define the self.

The effort heuristic is a mental rule of thumb in which the quality or worth of an object is determined from the perceived amount of effort that went into producing that object. In brief, the effort heuristic follows a tendency to judge objects that took a longer time to produce to be of higher value. The more effort invested in an object, the better it is deemed to be. This is especially true in situations where value is difficult to assess or the evaluator lacks expertise in the appraisement of an item. People use whatever information is available to them and effort is thought to generally be a reliable indicator of quality.

Self-evaluation maintenance (SEM) concerns discrepancies between two people in a relationship. The theory posits an individual will maintain as well as enhance their self-esteem via a social comparison to another individual. Self-evaluation refers to the self-perceived social ranking one has towards themselves. It is the continuous process of determining personal growth and progress, which can be raised or lowered by the behavior of others. Abraham Tesser created the self-evaluation maintenance theory in 1988. The self-evaluation maintenance model assumes two things: that a person will try to maintain or increase their own self-evaluation, and self-evaluation is influenced by relationships with others.

Self-enhancement is a type of motivation that works to make people feel good about themselves and to maintain self-esteem. This motive becomes especially prominent in situations of threat, failure or blows to one's self-esteem. Self-enhancement involves a preference for positive over negative self-views. It is one of the three self-evaluation motives along with self-assessment and self-verification . Self-evaluation motives drive the process of self-regulation, that is, how people control and direct their own actions.

Bertram Gawronski is a Social Psychologist and Professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin. He is known for his research in the areas of attitudes, social cognition, decision making, and moral psychology.

Implicit self-esteem refers to a person's disposition to evaluate themselves in a spontaneous, automatic, or unconscious manner. It contrasts with explicit self-esteem, which entails more conscious and reflective self-evaluation. Both explicit and implicit self-esteem are constituents of self-esteem.

Self-justification describes how, when a person encounters cognitive dissonance, or a situation in which a person's behavior is inconsistent with their beliefs (hypocrisy), that person tends to justify the behavior and deny any negative feedback associated with the behavior.

Implicit attitudes are evaluations that occur without conscious awareness towards an attitude object or the self. These evaluations are generally either favorable or unfavorable and come about from various influences in the individual experience. The commonly used definition of implicit attitude within cognitive and social psychology comes from Anthony Greenwald and Mahzarin Banaji's template for definitions of terms related to implicit cognition : "Implicit attitudes are introspectively unidentified traces of past experience that mediate favorable or unfavorable feeling, thought, or action toward social objects". These thoughts, feelings or actions have an influence on behavior that the individual may not be aware of.

Social comparison bias is the tendency to have feelings of dislike and competitiveness with someone seen as physically or mentally better than oneself.

Praise as a form of social interaction expresses recognition, reassurance or admiration. Praise is expressed verbally as well as by body language.

Frederick Rhodewalt was an American social psychologist at the University of Utah.

References

  1. Abraham Tesser
  2. Tesser, A., & Rosen, S. The reluctance to transmit bad news. In L. Berkowitz (Editor), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Volume 8). New York: Academic Press, 1975, 194-232.
  3. Tesser, A. Self-generated attitude change. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. XI). New York: Academic Press, 1978.
  4. Tesser, A., & Leone, C. Cognitive schemas and thought as determinants of attitude change. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1977, 13, 340-356.
  5. Millar, M. G. & Tesser, A. (1992). The role of beliefs and feelings in guiding behavior: The Mis-match Model. In L. Martin & A. Tesser (Eds.) The Construction of Social Judgement. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
  6. Tesser, A. (1993) On the importance of heritability in psychological research: The case of attitudes. Psychological Review, 100, 129-142.
  7. Tesser, A. (1988). Toward a self-evaluation maintenance model of social behavior. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Vol. 21), 181-227. New York: Academic Press.
  8. Beach, S. R. H. & Tesser, A. (1995). Self-esteem and the extended self-evaluation maintenance model: The self in social context. In M. Kernis (Ed.) Efficacy, Agency, and Self Esteem. New York: Plenum. Pp 145-170.
  9. Tesser, A., Crepaz, N., Collins, J. C. , Cornell, D. & Beach, S.R.H. (2000). Confluence of self defense mechanisms: On integrating the self zoo. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26, 1476-1489.. The element that connects these processes is posited to be negative affect.