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：比较思维和评价性思维的相互作用。人们用相对的术语来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才有意义)，人们把世界分为“好”和“坏”，分为“积极”和“消极”。这种互动是自然的，因为评估和比较是错综复杂的联系：大多数社会比较是评估性的，而大多数社会评价是比较的。然而，以往对这种相互作用的研究几乎完全集中在个人内部因素上，例如通过激活动机(例如，自我提升)、比较方向(例如，向上或向下)或比较心态(例如，同化或对比)。评价生态是由特定环境中评价信息的结构属性构成的。这种结构性特征的例子是评价信息的频率和多样性。我们在生态比较模型(ECM)中形式化了这种生态-比较交互作用，并在三个方面检验了该模型对评价结果的预测：1)对个人的系列评价，如在口试或选拔程序中；2)对群体的评价，如在外群和内群评价中；3)评价性学习，特别是在评价性条件作用下。认知比较过程与评价性生态特性的形式化交互作用使我们能够解释经典效应(例如，外群体贬损和内部群体偏爱)，并预测迄今未被发现的新现象(例如，评价性障碍)。因此，该项目的生态视角为理解人类认知的相对性提供了必要的因素。

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.