The Interaction of the Evaluative Ecology and Comparative Processing

本项目研究社会认知的两个基本方面：比较思维和评价思维的相互作用。人们以相对的方式思考他们的社会世界（例如，一个人能做的俯卧撑的数量只有在与参考标准相比时才有意义），人们将世界分为“好”和“坏”，“积极”和“消极”。这种相互作用自然而然地发生了，因为评价和比较是错综复杂地联系在一起的：大多数社会比较是评价性的，大多数社会评价也是比较性的。然而，之前对这种互动的研究几乎完全集中在个人因素上，例如，通过激活动机（如自我提升）、比较方向（如向上或向下）或比较心态（如同化或对比）。超越这些个人因素，我们从生态学的角度，特别是评估生态学的角度，研究了评估思维和比较思维的相互作用。评价生态是评价信息在特定环境下的结构属性所形成的。这种结构特性的例子是评价信息的频率和多样性。这些属性以一种可预测的方式与比较过程相互作用，例如寻找相似性与寻找差异，以产生可评估的结果。我们在生态比较模型（ECM）中形式化了这种生态-比较相互作用，并在三个方面测试了该模型对评估结果的预测：1)在口头学术考试或选择程序中对个人进行系列评估；2)群体评价，如群体外评价和群体内评价；3)评价性学习，特别是评价性条件反射。认知比较过程与评价生态特性的形式化相互作用使我们能够解释经典效应（例如，外群体贬损和内群体偏袒），并预测迄今为止尚未发现的新现象（例如，评价阻塞）。因此，该项目的生态视角为理解人类认知的相对性提供了一个基本要素。

The present project investigates the interaction of two fundamental aspects of social cognition: comparative thinking and evaluative thinking. People think about their social world in relative terms (e.g., the number of push-up one can do is only meaningful in comparison to a reference standard) and people divide the world into “good” and “bad”, into “positive” and “negative”. The interaction follows naturally, as evaluations and comparisons are intricately linked: most social comparisons are evaluative, and most social evaluations are comparative. However, previous research investigating this interaction has almost exclusively focused on intrapersonal factors, for example, by activating motives (e.g., self-enhancement), comparison directions (e.g., up- or downward), or comparative mindsets (e.g., assimilative or contrastive).Going beyond these intrapersonal factors, we investigate the interaction of evaluative and comparative thinking from an ecological perspective, specifically, the evaluative ecology. The evaluative ecology is formed by the structural properties of evaluative information in a given environment. Examples of such structural properties are the frequency and diversity of evaluative information. These properties interact in a predictable way with comparison processes, such as searching for similarities versus searching for differences, to produce evaluative outcomes.We have formalized this ecology-comparison interaction in an ecological comparison model (ECM) and test the predictions of this model for evaluative outcomes in three areas: 1) serial evaluations of individuals, as in oral academic exams or selection procedures; 2) evaluations of groups, as in outgroup and ingroup evaluations; and 3) evaluative learning, specifically in evaluative conditioning.The formalized interaction of cognitive comparison processes with the properties of the evaluative ecology allows us to explain classic effects (e.g., outgroup derogation and ingroup favoritism) and to predict novel, hitherto undiscovered phenomena (e.g., evaluative blocking). The project’s ecological perspective thereby provides an essential ingredient to understand the relativity of human cognition.