The Interaction of the Evaluative Ecology and Comparative Processing

评价生态学与比较处理的相互作用

• 批准号: 258501782
• 负责人: Professor Dr. Christian Unkelbach
• 金额: --
• 依托单位: Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine Psychologie II
• 依托单位国家: 德国
• 项目类别: Research Units
• 财政年份: 2014
• 资助国家: 德国
• 起止时间: 2013-12-31 至 2021-12-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://gepris.dfg.de/gepris/projekt/258501782?language=en
• 关键词: Interaction; Evaluative; Ecology; Comparative; Processing

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.

本项目研究社会认知的两个基本方面的相互作用：比较思维和评价思维。人们以相对的方式思考他们的社会世界（例如，一个人可以做的俯卧撑的数量只有与参考标准相比才有意义），人们将世界分为“好”和“坏”，分为“积极”和“消极”。这种相互作用是自然的，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，而大多数社会评价是比较性的。然而，以前的研究调查这种互动几乎完全集中在个人因素，例如，通过激活动机（例如，自增强），比较方向（例如，向上或向下），或比较心态（例如，超越这些内在因素，我们从生态学的角度，特别是评价生态学的角度，探讨了评价和比较思维的相互作用。评价生态是由评价信息在特定环境中的结构特性所形成的。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，如寻找相似性或寻找差异性，从而产生评价结果，我们将这种生态-比较相互作用形式化为生态比较模型（ECM），并在三个方面检验了该模型对评价结果的预测：1）个人的系列评价，如在口头学术考试或选拔程序中; 2）群体评价，如外群和内群评价; 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性生态学属性的形式化相互作用使我们能够解释经典效应（例如，外群贬损和内群偏袒）和预测新颖的、迄今未发现的现象（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必不可少的组成部分。