CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Karabegovic, Mia |
|---|---|
| Title | All the World's a Stage: Adaptive Impression Management and Prosociality |
| Summary | Audience effects – the differences which emerge due to one’s belief about whether or not their behaviour will be observed – have been documented in a variety of seemingly unrelated phenomena. In the present work, we first propose a unifying perspective of this effect based on evolutionary theory - in Chapter 1, we outline the benefits of an evolved impression management mechanism, its relevant inputs and cues thereof, the ways in which environmental features could influence its outputs (impression management strategies), and review of a number of findings we believe fit under the umbrella of this functional interpretation. In subsequent chapters, we empirically investigate the sensitivity to observation qualified by subtle changes in audience features. Chapter 2 investigates whether observers’ awareness of one’s knowledge about strategic incentives influences prosocial choice and subsequent observers’ evaluations of actors’ prosocial behaviour in more or less strategic contexts. Chapter 3 addresses the importance of future benefits one can expect from an audience in decisions to make an initial prosocial choice to advertise their trustworthiness and, on the flipside, how observers’ trust is modulated by the knowledge about these strategic incentives and choices. Chapters 4 and 5 shift the focus from cooperation to rule abidance: in Chapter 4, we address the relation between self-framing effects and local attitudes about social rules using two different methods (coordination games and self-report surveys); in Chapter 5 we investigate the influence of rule origins and leader intentions; while Chapter 6 presents an experiment about assortment and cost of rule following on rule abidance. We summarize the results we find in support for the idea of a fine-grained impression management mechanism sensitive to audience features in prosocial contexts in Chapter 7. |
| Supervisor | Heintz, Christophe; Sperber, Dan |
| Department | Cognitive Science PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/karabegovic_mia.pdf |
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