Robert S Wyer
Biographic Data
| ID | 75155 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Robert S Wyer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Robert S |
| FAMILY NAME | Wyer |
| SIGNATURE | WYER R S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-3776-5678 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 124 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 1159 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 121 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1964 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2021 |
| H-INDEX | 14 |
The friend number paradox
that is, a mismatch between people's preferences for the friends they might acquire in social interactions and their predictions of others' preferences. People predict that others are attracted to them if they have a relatively large number of friends. However, they personally prefer to make friends with someone who has a relatively small number of friends. People regard a large number of friends as a signal of social capital that increases their…
So difficult to smile: Why unhappy people avoid enjoyable activities
Engaging in an enjoyable activity is often effective in reducing or eliminating a negative mood. However, imagining this activity before deciding whether to perform it can decrease unhappy people's willingness to engage in it. The facial expression that accompanies a negative mood (and the muscles activated by the expression) can conflict with the expression that is elicited by imagining the performance of an enjoyable activity, evoking subjectiv…
The Influence of Incidental Similarity on Observers' Causal Attributions and Reactions to a Service Failure
Observers’ reactions to a service failure and their attributions of responsibility for its occurrence can depend on fortuitous characteristics of the protagonists that happen to draw their attention. Four field and laboratory experiments show that when observers have an incidental similarity to one of the persons involved in a service failure (the customer or the service provider), their attention is drawn to this protagonist, often leading them …
The Influence of Social Crowding on Brand Attachment
Feeling crowded in a shopping environment can decrease consumers' evaluations of a product or service and lower customer satisfaction. However, the present research suggests that a crowded environment can sometimes have a positive impact on consumer behavior. Although feeling crowded motivates consumers to avoid interacting with others, it leads them to become more attached to brands as an alternative way of maintaining their basic need for belon…
The interactive effects of bitter flavor and mood on the decision to spend or save money
Contextual Influences on Message Persuasion: The Effect of Empty Space
The empty space that surrounds a text message can affect the message’s persuasiveness. Seven studies provide converging evidence in both field and laboratory settings that people find a message less persuasive, and are less likely to act on its implications, when it is surrounded by empty space than when it is not. These effects are mediated by perceptions of message strength. That is, message recipients infer that a message conveys a less strong…
Mental traveling along psychological distances: The effects of cultural syndromes, perspective flexibility, and construal level
Individuals' psychological distance from the stimuli they encounter in daily life can influence the abstractness or generality of the mental representations they form of these stimuli. However, these representations can also depend on the perspective from which the stimuli are construed. When individuals have either an individualistic social orientation or a short-term temporal orientation, they construe psychologically distal events more globall…
Slowing Down in the Good Old Days: The Effect of Nostalgia on Consumer Patience
Nostalgia, which is induced by reminiscing about a positive past experience, can counteract loneliness and promote prosocial behavior. However, the process of recalling and thinking about a nostalgic experience can have quite different effects. Because nostalgic experiences rarely reoccur, people are motivated to savor them by prolonging the time they reminisce about them. The tendency to savor these experiences generalizes to situations that par…
Choosing Between Two Evils: The Determinants of Preferences for Two Equally Goal-Inconsistent Options
Previous research has examined how people resolve self-control dilemmas in which goal-congruent and goal-incongruent choices are both present. In the present research, however, the participants were asked to choose between two hedonically appealing options that were equally detrimental to a health goal. Six experiments show that activating a health goal decreases the choice share of the more salient, goal-incongruent option, leading the less sali…
Diverging effects of mortality salience on variety seeking: The different roles of death anxiety and semantic concept activation
Actors conform, observers react: The effects of behavioral synchrony on conformity
Engaging in synchronous behavior can induce a more general disposition to copy others, which increases the tendency to conform to others' preferences in an unrelated choice situation. In contrast, observing others perform synchronous behavior can induce psychological reactance and decrease conformity to others' preferences. Five experiments confirmed these different effects and circumscribed the conditions in which they occurred. Actors typically…
Consumer Reactions to Attractive Service Providers: Approach or Avoid
Attractive service providers are often assumed to elicit favorable consumer reactions and to increase purchase intentions. However, this may not always be true. A pilot study and five field and laboratory experiments show that when a self-presentation concern is made salient, consumers react less positively to highly attractive providers than to less attractive ones. This concern can be influenced by chronic social anxiety or can be aroused by un…
Advances in Social Cognition, Volume I: A Dual Process Model of Impression Formation
This volume presents different perspectives on a dual model of impression formation -- a theory about how people form impressions about other people by combining information about a person with prior knowledge found in long-term memory. This information is of real importance to graduate students and advanced undergraduates in cognitive and social psychology, experimental psychology, social cognition and perception. Each volume in the series will …
Handbook of Social Cognition: Basic Processes
This edition of the Handbook follows the first edition by 10 years. The earlier edition was a promissory note, presaging the directions in which the then-emerging field of social cognition was likely to move. The field was then in its infancy and the areas of research and theory that came to dominate the field during the next decade were only beginning to surface. The concepts and methods used had frequently been borrowed from cognitive psycholog…
Impact of money on emotional expression
Imagining Yourself in the Scene: The Interactive Effects of Goal-Driven Self-Imagery and Visual Perspectives on Consumer Behavior
Consumers often imagine themselves in a scene and engage in such self-imagery while processing information. The goals that they have when they engage in such imagery (e.g., a goal to construct a story of the experience vs. a goal to acquire information) can influence how the mental images they generate affect judgments. When pictures from very different perspectives are provided, those trying to imagine themselves in the scene in order to create …
Understanding Culture
Understanding Culture: Theory, Research, and Application
How time flies: The effects of conversation characteristics and partner attractiveness on duration judgments in a social interaction
Ruminative Thoughts: Advances in Social Cognition, Volume IX
Until recently, most theory and research in social information processing has focused attention on the cognitive activity that underlies responses to stimulus information presented in the immediate situation being investigated. In contrast, people's thoughts outside the laboratory often concern life events that either have occurred in the past or are likely to occur in the future. Thoughts about such past and future events can be spontaneous and,…
A Theory of Social Information Processing
The generalization of deliberative and automatic behavior: The role of procedural knowledge and affective reactions
Going my way? The benefits of travelling in the same direction
The Role of Bolstering and Counterarguing Mind-Sets in Persuasion
The effect of a persuasive communication on individuals’ attitudes can be influenced by the cognitive behavior they have performed in an earlier, unrelated situation. Inducing participants to make supportive elaborations about a series of propositions activated a bolstering mind-set that increased the effectiveness of an unrelated advertisement they encountered subsequently. However, inducing participants to refute the implications of a series of…
The Role of Relationship Norms in Responses to Service Failures
A friendly relationship with a service provider can sometimes decrease the negative feelings that consumers experience as the result of a service failure. However, friendship is not always beneficial. When consumers focus their attention on the provider’s obligation to respond to their needs, they react more negatively to a service failure when they are friends of the provider than when they have only a business relationship with him or her. When…
The role of category accessibility in the interpretation of information about persons: Some determinants and implications
Many personality trait terms can be thought of as summary labels for broad conceptual categories that are used to encode information about an individual's behavior into memory. The likelihood that a behavior is encoded in terms of a particular trait category is postulated to be a function of the relative accessibility
The Cognitive and Affective Bases of Political Tolerance Judgments
James H. Kuklinski, Department of Political Science and Institute of Government and Public Affairs, University of Illinois Ellen Riggle, Department of Political Science, University of Kentucky Victor Ottati, Department of Political Science, State University of New York at Stony Brook Norbert Schwarz, ZUMA, Mannheim, Federal Republic of Germany Robert S. Wyer, Jr., Department of Psychology, University of Illinois
Category accessibility and social perception: Some implications for the study of person memory and interpersonal judgments
Bases of political judgments: The role of stereotypic and nonstereotypic information
Effects of stereotypes in decision making and information-processing strategies
In two experiments we investigated the effects of stereotyping on (a) reactions to a behavioral transgression and (b) the recall of information bearing on it. Subjects read a case file describing a transgression committed by a target (in Experiment 1, a job-related infraction; in Experiment 2, a criminal act). In some cases, the target's transgression was stereotypic of the target's ethnic group (conveyed through his name), and in other cases it …
The recall of information about persons and groups
The cognitive representation of persons and groups and its effect on recall and recognition memory
The cognitive impact of past behavior: Influences on beliefs, attitudes, and future behavioral decisions
To study the processes by which past behavior influences future behavior, participants were led to believe that without being aware of it, they had expressed either support for or opposition to the institution of comprehensive exams. Judgment and response time data suggested that participants' perceptions of their past behavior often influenced their decisions to repeat the behavior. This influence was partly the result of cognitive activity that…
Information redundancy, inconsistency, and novelty and their role in impression formation
A probabilistic analysis of the relationships among belief and attitudes
Outlines an approach to the analysis of inference and classification processes, based on the assumption that subjective probabilities are related according to the laws of objective probability, and suggests certain of its implications for the study of relationships among attitudes and beliefs. Some preliminary empirical support for the formulation is reported. The consistency theories proposed by W. McGuire, by F. Heider, and by R. Abelson and M.…
The Effects of Television Consumption on Social Perceptions: The Use of Priming Procedures to Investigate Psychological Processes
Two studies investigated the extent to which heavy television viewing affects consumers' perceptions of social reality and the cognitive processes that underlie these effects. Both studies found evidence that heavy viewers' beliefs about social reality are more consistent with the content of television programming than are those of light viewers. The use of a priming methodology provided support for the notion that television is a causal factor i…
The effects of predicting a person's behavior on subsequent trait judgments
Quantitative prediction of belief and opinion change: A further test of a subjective probability model
Tested implications of the hypothesis that relations among beliefs, if defined in terms of subjective probabilities, are predictable by applying the laws of objective probability. Of particular interest was the extent to which change in 1 belief would predictably affect other beliefs which were related to it. 9 hypothetical situations were constructed, each of which pertained to an event (A) and its relation to a 2nd event (B). Descriptions of ea…
The Effect of Mind-Sets on Consumer Decision Strategies
When consumers consider their preference for one of a set of products without having decided whether or not they want to buy something, they develop a “which-to-buy” mind-set that increases their likelihood of making a purchase both in the situation at hand and in subsequent unrelated situations. The effect of this mind-set is evident regardless of the commonality of the alternatives' features and regardless of whether or not the purchase decisio…
The Role of Relationship Norms in Responses to Service Failures
A friendly relationship with a service provider can sometimes decrease the negative feelings that consumers experience as the result of a service failure. However, friendship is not always beneficial. When consumers focus their attention on the provider’s obligation to respond to their needs, they react more negatively to a service failure when they are friends of the provider than when they have only a business relationship with him or her. When…
Cross-cultural differences in the refusal to accept a small gift: The differential influence of reciprocity norms on Asians and North Americans
Asians are more likely than North Americans to refuse a small gift that is offered to them by a casual acquaintance. Five experiments confirmed this difference and explored the reasons for its occurrence. Asians, who are inclined to think of themselves in relation to others, are more likely than North Americans to invoke a reciprocity norm in exchanging gifts with casual acquaintances, and they refuse a gift in order to avoid the feeling of indeb…
Affect, Appraisal, and Consumer Judgment
When consumers receive verbal information about a product's attributes, the influence of the affect they are experiencing on their product evaluations depends on their belief that the product should be judged on the basis of hedonic versus utilitarian criteria. When consumers see the product before they receive attribute information, however, the product's appearance can stimulate them to form an affect-based initial impression that they later us…
Prediction of behavior in two-person games
Attempted (1) to determine whether behavior in restricted 2-person interaction situations (games), could be more easily predicted by transforming outcomes, i.e., number of points, to utilities, estimated on the basis of an independent measure; and (2) to identify a set of descriptive parameters which were related to behavior in different types of situations. 12 outcome matrices, representative of the 2-person games classified by A. Rapoport and M…
The impact of pictures on narrative- and list-based impression formation: A process interference model
The Effect of Group Membership Salience on the Avoidance of Negative Outcomes: Implications for Social and Consumer Decisions
Calling consumers' attention to their cultural identity can make them aware of their membership in a group and, therefore, can induce a group mind-set. This mind-set, in turn, leads them to make decisions that minimize the risk of negative outcomes to both themselves and others. The effects of this mind-set generalize over both group and individual choice situations. These possibilities were confirmed in a series of six experiments. Results showe…
Cognitive Correlates of Subjective Well-Being: The Processing of Valenced Life Events by Happy and Unhappy Persons
In a two-phase study, we examined the relations of subjective well-being with the cognitive processing of affectively valenced life events. In Phase 1, both more intense and more enduring reactions to positive life events than negative ones were associated with higher well-being, and for intensity of reactions, this relation was stronger for those events that were subsequently recalled. When equal numbers of positive and negative life events were…
The Influence of Incidental Similarity on Observers' Causal Attributions and Reactions to a Service Failure
Observers’ reactions to a service failure and their attributions of responsibility for its occurrence can depend on fortuitous characteristics of the protagonists that happen to draw their attention. Four field and laboratory experiments show that when observers have an incidental similarity to one of the persons involved in a service failure (the customer or the service provider), their attention is drawn to this protagonist, often leading them …
Imagining Yourself in the Scene: The Interactive Effects of Goal-Driven Self-Imagery and Visual Perspectives on Consumer Behavior
Consumers often imagine themselves in a scene and engage in such self-imagery while processing information. The goals that they have when they engage in such imagery (e.g., a goal to construct a story of the experience vs. a goal to acquire information) can influence how the mental images they generate affect judgments. When pictures from very different perspectives are provided, those trying to imagine themselves in the scene in order to create …
The effects of traits and gender stereotypes on occupational suitability judgments and the recall of judgment-relevant information
The Influence of Social Crowding on Brand Attachment
Feeling crowded in a shopping environment can decrease consumers' evaluations of a product or service and lower customer satisfaction. However, the present research suggests that a crowded environment can sometimes have a positive impact on consumer behavior. Although feeling crowded motivates consumers to avoid interacting with others, it leads them to become more attached to brands as an alternative way of maintaining their basic need for belon…
Assessment and correlates of cognitive differentiation and integration1
Effect of child-rearing attitudes and behavior on children's responses to hypothetical social situations
35 preschool children were asked to respond verbally to hypothetical social situations by selecting for each situation an outcome that was similar to what would happen to them. Decision time in making these selections correlated positively with teachers' ratings of social inhibition in these children and was therefore interpreted as a measure of uncertainty in social situations. The assumed attractiveness of each child's selections was also recor…
Self-acceptance, discrepancy between parents' perceptions of their children, and goal-seeking effectiveness
Delineates the interrelationship of self-acceptance, differences between parents' perceptions of their children, and goal-seeking effectiveness within an academic setting. Measures were obtained on about 350 male and 400 female college students of their self-perceptions and self-acceptance, their parents' perceptions and acceptance of them, and parental attitudes toward academic pursuits. Self-acceptance and parental acceptance related to academi…
Social role and academic achievement
Investigates the relationship between social role and academic achievement in college students. A sample of 28 males and 28 females were selected from a large sample of college sophomores and classified into 4 groups on the basis of their academic aptitude and academic performance. Analyses were made involving these Ss' desires to receive social and academic recognition, the certainty of their occupational choice, their self-sufficiency or social…
Social role, aggression, and academic achievement
This study tried to delineate aspects of aggression which relate to academic effectiveness in college as a function of differences in the social role ascribed to males and females. Academic effectiveness was defined as the degree to which performance exceeds or falls short of what would be predicted on the basis of aptitude alone. A sample of 45 males and 48 females was administered Siegel's Manifest Hostility Scale, from which subscale scores we…
Effects of incentive to perform well, group attraction, and group acceptance on conformity in a judgmental task
Determines the effects of group acceptance (the degree to which Ss are led to believe they were liked by other group members) on conformity in a judgmental task. Groups of high-school Ss estimated the number of dots presented on slides under incentive to perform well and no-incentive conditions. Judgments were made both before and after exposure to fictitious group norms. When incentive was high, Ss conformed unless they were low in both group at…
Quality Education and Integration: An Exploratory Study
Behavioral correlates of academic achievement: Conformity under achievement- and affiliation-incentive conditions
61 FRESHMAN MALES AND 64 FRESHMAN FEMALES, REPRESENTING 4 COMBINATIONS OF ACADEMIC APTITUDE (COLLEGE ENTRANCE EXAMINATION SCORE) AND PERFORMANCE (1ST-TERM GRADE-POINT AVERAGE), WERE ASKED TO ESTIMATE THE NUMBER OF DOTS ON SLIDES BEFORE AND AFTER EXPOSURE TO FICTITIOUS GROUP JUDGMENTS. CONFORMITY WAS MEASURED UNDER ACHIEVEMENT-INCENTIVE CONDITIONS, IN WHICH SS WERE TOLD THAT THEIR PERFORMANCE ON THE TASK WOULD REFLECT THEIR ACHIEVEMENT POTENTIAL, …
Some determinants of perseverance in achievement-related activity
Effects of attitude direction, attitude intensity, and structure of beliefs upon differentiation
40 undergraduate concrete and abstract Ss made ratings of positive, negative, and neutral stimuli in the domains of social beliefs and interpersonal relations toward which they varied in the intensity of their feeling. Neutral stimuli were better differentiated than were either positive or negative stimuli between which there was no difference. Attitudinal intensity significantly affected 1 of the 2 measures of differentiation and also interacted…
Effect of context and instructional set upon evaluations of personality-trait adjectives
A series of studies was performed to investigate the effect of context upon evaluations made of personality-trait adjectives. Ss were presented sets of 3 adjectives which varied in favorableness as indicated by normative data and were then asked to evaluate 1 (test) adjective in each set under a variety of instructional conditions. Results indicated that whenever Ss were asked to rate the 3 adjectives in each set as a collective before rating tes…
Effects of task reinforcement, social reinforcement, and task difficulty on perseverance in achievement-related activity
70 PRESCHOOL CHILDREN WERE ASKED TO PERFORM EITHER AN EASY TASK THEY WERE TOLD WAS EASY FOR OTHER CHILDREN, AN EASY TASK THEY WERE TOLD WAS DIFFICULT FOR OTHERS, A DIFFICULT TASK THEY WERE TOLD WAS EASY FOR OTHERS, OR A DIFFICULT TASK THEY WERE TOLD WAS DIFFICULT. BEFORE PERFORMING THIS TASK, SS WERE EXPOSED TO A DIFFERENT TASK ON WHICH THEIR SUCCESS OR FAILURE WAS DETERMINED BY THE E. SS RECEIVED EITHER APPROVAL OR DISAPPROVAL FROM THE E WHILE P…
Context effects in impression formation
Performed 3 studies to investigate the effects of several variables upon the tendency for evaluations of personality-trait adjectives to be displaced toward the likableness of the adjectives accompanying them (their context). Ss were 80 undergraduates. The variables were suggested by 3 theoretical interpretations of context effects, including N. H. Anderson and A. K. Lampel's (see 40:3) weighted average formulation; R. S. Wyer and M. Dermer's (se…
Some contingencies in the effects of the source of a communication on the evaluation of that communication
Undergraduates evaluated 1 of 4 types of communications statements about Negroes, statements about social issues, cartoons, or photographs. The evaluations were investigated as a function of the quality of the communications that preceded them, whether the communications in the series originated from 1 source or from different sources, the logical consistency of the communications in the series, and incentive to perform well on the rating task. R…
Prediction of behavior in two-person games
Attempted (1) to determine whether behavior in restricted 2-person interaction situations (games), could be more easily predicted by transforming outcomes, i.e., number of points, to utilities, estimated on the basis of an independent measure; and (2) to identify a set of descriptive parameters which were related to behavior in different types of situations. 12 outcome matrices, representative of the 2-person games classified by A. Rapoport and M…
The Prediction of Evaluations of Social Role Occupants as a Function of the Favorableness, Relevance and Probability Associated with Attributes of These Occupants
A test of cognitive balance theory implications for social inference processes
95 undergraduates inferred the likelihood of positive, neutral, and negative relations between elements in a triad both in the absence of prior information about other relations involving these elements and in the context of various information combinations differing in their affective quality. The stability of a situation in which the 3 relations occurred was also estimated. Data obtained in the absence of knowledge about other relations in the …
Information redundancy, inconsistency, and novelty and their role in impression formation
A probabilistic analysis of the relationships among belief and attitudes
Outlines an approach to the analysis of inference and classification processes, based on the assumption that subjective probabilities are related according to the laws of objective probability, and suggests certain of its implications for the study of relationships among attitudes and beliefs. Some preliminary empirical support for the formulation is reported. The consistency theories proposed by W. McGuire, by F. Heider, and by R. Abelson and M.…
Quantitative prediction of belief and opinion change: A further test of a subjective probability model
Tested implications of the hypothesis that relations among beliefs, if defined in terms of subjective probabilities, are predictable by applying the laws of objective probability. Of particular interest was the extent to which change in 1 belief would predictably affect other beliefs which were related to it. 9 hypothetical situations were constructed, each of which pertained to an event (A) and its relation to a 2nd event (B). Descriptions of ea…
Some effects of fate control upon the tendency to benefit an exploitative other
Each of 135 undergraduates (p) interacted with a simulated other (o) in a 2-person game. The amount of fate control each party had over himself and the other was systematically varied over experimental conditions. Over the course of 30 trials, o typically chose the response that would maximize his own gain at cost to P. P was relatively less likely to benefit o at cost to himself when o had substantial control over his own outcomes. On the other …
Effects of outcome matrix and partner's behavior in two-person games
Effects of sex and achievement level upon individualism and competitiveness in social interaction
Some further evidence for the "Socratic effect" using a subjective probability model of cognitive organization
Examined possible situational determinants of the Socratic effect (i.e. the tendency for inconsistencies among sets of related beliefs to decrease over time). Inconsistency was defined as the deviation from prediction of a subjective probability model of cognitive organization. Evidence for the Socratic effect was obtained in 2 experiments with undergraduates (N = 108). The influence of 3 factors was investigated: (a) increased awareness that the…
Test of a subjective probability model of social evaluation processes
Used a subjective probability model to predict the extent to which persons were liked, and changes in likableness, from beliefs associated with various attributes of these persons. Each of 48 undergraduates (P) was asked to estimate the probability that he and another (O) were liked, and also the probability that he and O possessed a series of personality attributes. These estimates were obtained both before and after P had received false informa…
Psychology (119 works) · Social Psychology (101 works) · Cognitive psychology (71 works) · Social Psychology (71 works) · Cognition (46 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (36 works) · Developmental psychology (29 works) · Perception (28 works) · Computer Science (27 works) · Social perception (23 works)