Dagmar Stahlberg

• University of Mannheim

We tested the popular claim that women only apply for jobs when they are 100% qualified, whereas men apply already with as little as a 60% qualification fit. In Study 1, we presented a job advertisement and a CV with different levels of qualification fit. Participants were asked to imagine that the presented CV was their own and to indicate whether...

Background and Objective Subordinates in Western cultures generally prefer supervisors with a democratic rather than autocratic leadership style. It is unclear, however, whether more narcissistic subordinates share or challenge this prodemocratic default attitude. On the one hand, more narcissistic individuals strive for power and thus may favor a...

Background Judging positive emotional states or the trustworthiness of others is important for forming and maintaining social affiliations. Past studies have described alterations in these appraisal processes in Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD), which might have been exacerbated during the Covid-19 pandemic by the requirement to wear face mask...

We propose that an organizational culture where playing politics is important for advancement, compared with an organizational culture where showing competencies is important, elicits stronger lack of fit experiences for women than for men. In a pre-study, playing politics was perceived as dominant, typically male work behaviors, whereas showing co...

Background During the Covid-19 pandemic, the negative effects of wearing a mouth-nose cover (MNC) on interpersonal functioning have been discussed in public media but empirical studies on how wearing MNCs affect social judgements are sparse. In the present study, we investigated the effects of MNCs on trustworthiness appraisals, the influence of ch...

Motto-goals describe a desired mind-set and provide a person with a guiding principle of how to approach a personal goal or obligation (e.g., with the inner strength of a bear I am forging ahead). We propose that motto-goals can be conceptionalized as individually created metaphors and that the figurative, metaphorical language and the characterist...

Poor sleep quality is highly prevalent in modern societies and negatively linked to various health outcomes. While previous research has demonstrated preliminary evidence for self-compassion as a tool for improving sleep quality, this review provides a meta-analysis of respective published and unpublished results of our own research group using Ger...

Nonnative-accented speakers face prevalent discrimination. The assumption that people freely express negative sentiments toward nonnative speakers has also guided common research methods. However, recent studies did not consistently find downgrading, so that prejudice against nonnative accents might even be questioned at first sight. The present th...

Poor sleep quality is highly prevalent in modern societies and can be associated with a multitude of problems for individuals and organizations, and also for society at large. Thus, there is a demand for efficient treatments. We suggest that short self-compassion interventions will improve sleep quality via reducing ruminative thoughts, a key varia...

Präsentationsangst, also die Angst vor öffentlicher Rede oder Präsentationen, stellt aufgrund einer vergleichsweise hohen Prävalenz und nachgewiesener negativer Konsequen- zen für viele Studierende eine Herausforderung dar. Im vor- liegenden Projekt wurde eine auf Humor basierende Kurz- intervention entwickelt, um Präsentationsangst effektiv zu beg...

Mind-body practices enjoy immense public and scientific interest. Yoga and meditation are highly popular. Purportedly, they foster well-being by “quieting the ego” or, more specifically, curtailing self-enhancement. However, this ego-quieting effect contradicts an apparent psychological universal, the self-centrality principle. According to this pr...

The present research unites two emergent trends in the area of language attitudes: (a) research on perceptions of nonnative speakers by nonnative listeners and (b) the search for general, basic mechanisms underlying the evaluation of nonnative accented speakers. In three experiments featuring an employment situation, German participants listened to...

Nonnative accents are prevalent in our globalized world and constitute highly salient cues in social perception. Whereas previous literature has commonly assumed that they cue specific social group stereotypes, we propose that nonnative accents generally trigger spontaneous negatively biased associations (due to a general nonnative accent category...

Hypersensitivity to injustice has been proposed to contribute to interpersonal dysfunction in borderline personality disorder (BPD). We investigated whether BPD features are related to sensitivity to injustice and whether justice sensitivity mediates the relationship between BPD features and aggressive behavior. In an online survey, subjects report...

Cross-cultural research has indicated that bicultural individuals switch their behavioral patterns according to situational cultural frames. Based on self-categorization theory and evidence that being prototypical for an ingroup can increase ingroup identification, we investigated the idea that when being prototypical for a specific culture, bicult...

Parental gender-stereotyped perceptions of newborns – particularly their physical characteristics – have been discussed as important determinants of sex-role socialization from birth on. However, corresponding empirical evidence is inconclusive. We propose that inconsistent findings on gender-correlated perceptions are due to whether or not actual...

Individuals high in exchange orientation expect immediate and comparable rewards in order to establish exchange equality after they have provided rewards for others. Therefore, such individuals should be less likely than individuals low in exchange orientation to behave prosocially because doing such usually leads to exchange inequality (i.e., post...

According to social identity theory people are viewed as prototypical of a group to the extent that they possess ingroup characteristics but not outgroup characteristics. Based on this, previous research demonstrated that high-status group members (e.g., in the occupational field: men) may profit from failure in low-status domains, that is, domains...

We introduce a new nonverbal and unobtrusive measure to assess power motive activation, the Spatial Power Motivation Scale (SPMS). The unique features of this instrument are that it is (a) very simple and economical, (b) reliable and valid, and (c) sensitive to situational changes. Study 1 demonstrates the instrument's convergent and discriminant v...

Research on domain-specific sociometer theory suggests that individual mate value has a great influence on self-esteem. In this study (N = 124), we investigated the notion that perceived high gender typicality increases one’s perceived mate value and thus counteracts the usual decline in state self-esteem following negative feedback. The participan...

Little is known about the linguistic transmission and maintenance of mutual stereotypes in interethnic contexts. This field study, therefore, investigated the linguistic expectancy bias (LEB) and the linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) among German and Turkish adolescents (13 to 20 years) in the school context. The LEB refers to the general phenomenon...

Previous research has demonstrated that failure on a task may at times increase self-esteem, known as the failure-as-an-asset effect. This effect is observed when high-status group members (e.g., referring to management positions: men) show poor performance in a domain that is seen as a low-status domain—one in which the low-status group (e.g., ref...

Research on effects of message repetition suggested an inverted U-shaped relationship between the number of message repetitions and the attitude toward the message content. Furthermore, it was indicated that when people are processing persuasive health messages, they use source credibility as a cue for judgments about the message. Built on that, re...

Heuristics have been described as decision strategies that save time and effort. Given this advantageous property, heuristics should be more often used when cognitive resources are scarce. We tested this general view with respect to the fast and frugal recognition heuristic which assumes one-reason decision making based on recognition alone wheneve...

Language attitudes may be differentiated into attitudes towards speakers and attitudes towards languages. However, to date, no systematic and differentiated instrument exists that measures attitudes towards language. Accordingly, we developed, validated, and applied the Attitudes Towards Languages (AToL) scale in four studies. In Study 1, we select...

Research on terror management theory has found evidence that people under mortality salience strive to live up to salient cultural norms and values, such as egalitarianism, pacifism, or helpfulness. A basic and strong internalized norm in most human societies is the norm of reciprocity: People should support those who have supported them, and peopl...

Research on terror management theory found evidence that people under mortality salience strive to live up to salient cultural norms and values, like egalitarianism, pacifism, or helpfulness. A basic, strongly internalized norm in most human societies is the norm of reciprocity: people should support those who supported them (i.e., positive recipro...

In two experiments, recent findings showing the detrimental role of regulatory depletion in decision making are extended to the field of deception detection. In both experiments, the state of ego depletion was induced by having judges inhibit versus non-inhibit a dominant response while transcribing a text. Subsequently they judged true or deceptiv...

Trust has been identified as a key ingredient to the prosperity of close relationships, organizations, and societies. While research mainly focused on the antecedents and consequences of trust, much less is known about how individuals assess whether there are enough reasons to warrant trustful action. Two experiments explored the how and when of th...

A great deal of research has been dedicated to the difficulties women face in business management domains because they lack the required "masculinity" in terms of masculine skills and traits. Previous work has shown that when males are judged, failures in typical feminine tasks can signal high masculinity and can therefore become an asset in terms...

In educational AIDS campaigns, initiators often use advertisements to warn about the threat of AIDS. The present Internet study (N = 283) tested the assumption of an inverted U-shaped relationship between the number of educational AIDS advertisements in a magazine and the perceived threat of AIDS among different groups (i.e., homosexual men and het...

We investigated the impact of uncertainty on leadership preferences and propose that the conjunction of self-esteem level and stability is an important moderator in this regard. Self-threatening uncertainty is aversive and activates the motivation to regain control. People with high and stable self-esteem should be confident of achieving this goal...

Procedural justice concerns play a critical role in economic settings, politics, and other domains of human life. Despite the vast evidence corroborating their relevance, considerably less is known about how procedural justice judgments are formed. Whereas earlier theorizing focused on the systematic integration of content information, the present...

Ego-depletion theory postulates the existence of a mental resource that is necessary for self-regulation. If the resource is diminished by a task involving self-control, achievement in subsequent self-control tasks will be impaired. Three experiments examined whether ego-depletion limits people’s intentionality regarding risk behavior (i.e., choosi...

Hindsight bias is the tendency of people to falsely believe that they would have correctly predicted the outcome of an event once it is known. The present paper addresses the ongoing debate as to whether the hindsight bias is due to memory impairment or biased reconstruction. The memory impairment approach maintains that outcome information alters...

Two studies demonstrate that members of high-status groups (i.e., men and students of business administration) but not members of low-status groups (i.e., women and education students) react with an increase in state self-esteem after an alleged poor performance on a fictitious intelligence test. This Failure-as-an-Asset (FA) effect is only observe...

The present research investigates the influence on cooperative behavior of accessibility experiences associated with the retrieval of fairness-relevant information from memory. We argue that the decision whether to cooperate in negotiations depends not only on information about the appropriateness of the negotiation procedure, but also on the exper...

„Männer und Frauen sind gleichberechtigt“ (Grundgesetz für die BRD, Artikel 3 Abs. 2). Bei der Gründung der Bundesrepublik Deutschland im Mai 1949 wurde dieser Satz in das Grundgesetz aufgenommen. Damit war ein wichtiger Schritt getan, der gleichzeitig definierte, dass von Geschlechterdiskriminierung dann zu sprechen sei, wenn eine Person aufgrund...

According to research on social identity theory and on prescriptive norms and stereotypes people are viewed as prototypical of a group to the extent that they possess ingroup characteristics but not outgroup characteristics. Following this assumption, even failure might have positive effects for high-status persons when they underperform in low-sta...

The present research investigates the influence on cooperative behavior of accessibility experiences associated with the retrieval of fairness-relevant information from memory. We argue that the decision whether to cooperate in negotiations depends not only on information about the appropriateness of the negotiation procedure, but also on the exper...

Both fairness and trust are crucial to our willingness to cooperate with others. Whereas the importance of both fairness and trust for social interactions has been subject to empirical investigation, less is known about the interplay between the two constructs. In the present work, we investigated whether procedural fairness causally determines tru...

Ego depletion theory postulates the existence of a cognitive resource that is necessary to engage in self-regulation (e.g., the suppression of thought and emotions, the active initiation of behavior, the regulation of emotional states and decision making). If the resource is diminished by a task involving self-control, achievement in subsequent tas...

Archer and colleagues (1983) showed that in a variety of media, such as journals, works of art, or amateur drawings, men are depicted with greater facial prominence than women, i.e., with more focus on the face. Additionally, they showed that people depicted with greater focus on the face are evaluated as being more intelligent, assertive, and ambi...

Attitudes with respect to risk bearing and impatience are potentially important determinants of a households' decision whether or not to hold a certain assets. They are, however, hard to measure and potentially endogenous with respect to wealth levels. This study addresses both issues explicitly. Specifically, we exploit a set of subjective measure...

Hindsight bias is the well researched phenomenon that people falsely believe that they would have correctly predicted the outcome of an event once it is known. In recent years, several authors have doubted the ubiquity of the effect and have reported a reversal under certain conditions. This article presents an integrative model on the role of surp...

This paper presents empirical evidence corroborating the idea that procedural justice judgments are not only based on the accessible content information about the procedure, but also on accessibility experiences that accompany the accession of content about the procedure. Four experiments support the hypothesis that people judge a selection procedu...

In two experiments, the influence of physical appearance and sex on the attribution of leadership competence was analyzed. Participants (male/female) reacted to stimulus persons from one of four groups varying in terms of sex (male/female) and physical appearance (feminine/masculine). The stimulus persons were introduced via photographs. Dependent...

Zusammenfassung. In der vorliegenden Studie wurde untersucht, inwieweit sich Mitarbeiter/innen (N = 155) einer ubernehmenden und einer ubernommenen Organisation (Ubernehmerposition: Ubernehmer vs. Ubernommene) im Hinblick auf das emotionale Wohlbefinden, die Identifikation mit dem neu geschaffenen Unternehmen und die subjektiv erlebte Kontrolle ube...

This article presents a series of experiments which were conducted among native speakers of German to determine the influence of different types of German generics on the cognitive inclusion of women. Results indicate that the inclusion of women is higher with 'non-sexist' alternatives than with masculine generics, a tendency which was consistent a...

An Erratum has been published for this article in Journal of Organizational Behavior 26(7) 2005, 873. Previous research on the relationship between alternative employment opportunities and cooperation has neglected the distinction between evaluations and restrictions. Thus, one cannot analyze the relationship between attractiveness of alternative...

Being in hindsight, people tend to overestimate what they had known in foresight. This phenomenon has been studied for a wide variety of knowledge domains (e.g., episodes with uncertain outcomes, or solutions to almanac questions). As a result of these studies, hindsight bias turned out to be a robust phenomenon. In this paper, we present two exper...

The classification of perfumes as ‘women's’ and ‘men's’ fragrances is based on certain gender stereotypes. In two experiments, female and male participants were asked to assume the role of a manager. In Experiment 1, they read an application for the position of a junior manager written by a male or female job applicant. Application papers were prep...

Previous findings have shown that affective reactions (e.g. satisfaction with feedback) are guided by self-enhancement theory, whereas cognitive reactions (e.g. perceived feedback accuracy) have been shown to follow predictions of self-consistency theory. The Integrative Self-Schema Model (ISSM) assumes that these effects should be moderated by ela...

Being in hindsight, people tend to overestimate what they had known in foresight. This phenomenon has been studied for a wide variety of knowledge domains (e.g., episodes with uncertain outcomes, results of football games, or solutions to almanac questions). As a result of these studies, hindsight bias turned out to be a robust phenomenon. Yet, all...

The hindsight bias represents the tendency of people to falsely believe that they would have predicted the outcome of an event, once the outcome is known. The present study investigates whether the strength of the hindsight bias depends on the self-esteem relevance and the quality of the event predicted. In three experiments students participated i...

The hindsight bias represents the tendency of people to falsely believe that they would have predicted the outcome of an event, once the outcome is known. Two experiments will be presented that show a reduction or even reversal of the hindsight bias when the outcome information is self-threatening for the participants. Participants read a report of...

Im Alltag zeigt sich immer wieder, dass viele Menschen sich selbst sehr positiv bewerten. Die eigenen Stärken werden dabei im Vergleich zu anderen Menschen als etwas Besonderes und die eigenen Schwächen als etwas Normales angesehen. Auch neigen Menschen dazu, unglückliche Umstände oder andere Personen für ihre eigenen Misserfolge verantwortlich zu...

This article reports on two experiments waith native speakers of German that were conducted to determine the influence of different types of German generics on the cognitive inclusion of women. The results of these studies show that masculine versus other types of generics influence the retrieval of male and female exemplars from memory. This is th...

Zusammenfassung. In der feministischen Linguistik wird angenommen, das maskuline Bezeichnungen, die generisch benutzt werden (Bezeichnungen von Personen beiderlei Geschlechts durch die maskuline Form, wie z.B. die Wissenschaftler, die Studenten), weibliche Personen weniger vorstellbar oder sichtbar machen als mannliche Personen. Verschiedene experi...

Many studies have investigated how different self-relevant feedback can influence a person's reactions. Some results have confirmed the self-enhancement theory and some the self-consistency theory. Shrauger (1975) analyzed the empirical results and came to the conclusion that a person's affective reaction is in line with the self-enhancement theory...

The phenomenon of sexually harassing telephone calls in the workplace has been studied only marginally. In the present study 106 employees working in call centres in Germany answered a questionnaire regarding their experiences of sexual harassment over the telephone. The following data are presented: description of the phenomenon, i.e. prevalence a...

The basic assumption of the integrative self-schema model (ISSM; L.-E. Petersen, 1994; L.-E. Petersen, D. Stahlberg, & D. Dauenheimer, 1996; D. Stahlberg, L.-E. Petersen, & D. Dauenheimer, 1994, 1999) is that self-schema elaboration (schematic vs. aschematic) affects reactions to self-relevant information. This assumption is based on the idea that...

The classification of perfumes as 'women's' and 'men's' fragrances is based on certain gender role stereotypes: 'flowery' or 'fruity' fragrances for women, 'spicy' and 'strong(tangy)' fragrances for men. Are such fragrances processed in a gender-stereotyped manner, as other sensual perceptions are? Do they affect the evaluation of persons in a prof...

Feminist linguists claim that masculine forms used in a generic sense (e.g. he referring to a doctor irrespective of sex) facilitate the cognitive representation of men compared to women and make women less visible. A number of experimental studies have confirmed this assumption with regard to the English language. Concerning other languages, howev...

The term 'hindsight bias' describes the tendency of peoples� recalled predictions of events to shift towards the real or alleged outcome, once the outcome of the event is known. Although this phenomenon has often been replicated since it was first investigated in the mid-seventies, the underlying processes are not yet fully understood. Within the l...

Previous research examined the predictions of the self-enhancement theory and the self-consistency theory regarding reactions to self-relevant feedback. In the present study two circumstances that are supposed to moderate self-enhancement and self-consistency motives have been examined: the elaboration of a self-conception and the discrepancy betwe...

Sexuelle Belastigung am Telefon ist ein in der bisherigen sozialwissenschaftlichen Forschung vernachlassigtes Alltagsphanomen. Die vorliegende Studie zur Analyse dieses Phanomens wurde reprasentativ fur Deutschland durchgefuhrt. In der ersten Phase der Studie wurde eine Ausgangsstich-probe von mehr als 3000 Personen mundlich mittels eines Frageboge...

Previous findings have shown that some reactions (e.g. satisfaction with feedback) are guided by self-enhancement theory, whereas other reactions (e.g. perceived feedback accuracy) have been shown to follow predictions of self-consistency theory. The Integrative Self-Schema Model (ISSM) assumes that these eff€ects should be moderated by the elabora...

In hindsight, people tend to overestimate what they had known in foresight. Two experiments tested whether this bias is due or at least moderated by the self-presentation motive. In Experiment 1, 165 participants received seven problem cases with two possible outcomes and supporting arguments each. All participants rated the importance of the argum...

The hindsight bias is the tendency of people to falsely believe that they would have predicted the outcome of an event correctly, once the outcome is known. The present paper addresses the ongoing debate whether the hindsight bias is due to memory impairment or biased reconstruction. The memory impairment approach states that outcome information al...

The hindsight bias is the tendency of people to falsely believe that they would have predicted the outcome of an event correctly, once the outcome is known. Several studies show that the hindsight bias is a robust phenomenon and that it has been demonstrated in a wide variety of decision problems. The present paper shows for the first time that the...

Hindsight bias ("Knew it all along effect") describes the tendency for people to falsely believe that they would have predicted the outcome of an event, once the outcome is known. Some authors (e.g. Bukszar and Connolly, 1988, Hoch and Loewenstein, 1989, Fischhoff, 1975) assumed, that in retrospect, people who are subject to the hindsight bias perc...

This experiment examines the role of the hindsight bias and of motivational forces such as the motive to believe in a just world as possible causes of the derogation of victims effect in the context of rape. The hindsight bias is the tendency of people to falsely believe that they would have predicted the outcome of an event once the outcome is kno...

In diesem Kapitel werden Struktur und Messung von Einstellungen, Prozesse der Einstellungsänderung sowie die Beziehung zwischen Einstellungen und Verhalten diskutiert. Das Interesse an diesen Themen hat in den letzten Jahren - nach einem zwischenzeitlichen Rückgang in den 1960er und 1970er Jahren - stark zugenommen. Das Nachlassen des Interesses an...

What is the interplay of three self-evaluation motives (i.e., self-enhancement, self-assessment, self-verification) in the affective, cognitive, and behavioral domain? Does modifiability of self-views (i.e., assertiveness) moderate motive activation in each domain? Participants (Ps) (a) rated their assertiveness and their perceived modifiability of...

While various studies about reactions towards feedback have confirmed the self-enhancement theory others are in support of the self-consistency theory. Shrauger (1975) tried to reconcile the controversy between the two theories. He postulated that the affective reaction is in line with the self-enhancement theory and the cognitive reaction supports...

The hindsight bias is the tendency for people to believe falsely that they would have predicted the outcome of an event, once the outcome is known. Although there is a rich literature on hindsight distortions, the underlying mechanisms are not yet fully understood. The present paper addresses the question whether hindsight distiortions represent th...

This study investigated how the self-concept affects reactions to self-relevant information. Subjects received fictitious feedback on six different personality dimensions. These feedbacks were either consistent with self-perceptions, more positive than expected (closer to the ideal self) or more negative than expected (feedback: self-consistent vs....

Two studies investigated the occurrence of hindsight distortion in groups as compared to individuals. Competing predictions were derived from four theoretical positions: Memory impairment, response bias, self-presentation, and group polarization. In Experiment 1, small groups vs individuals made hypothetical predictions with or without outcome info...

The linguistic intergroup bias describes the tendency to communicate positive in-group and negative out-group behaviors more abstractly than negative in-group and positive out-group behaviors. This article investigated whether this bias is driven by differential expectancies or by in-group protective motives. In Experiment 1, northern and southern...

Das Konzept der Einstellung gehört vermutlich zu den bedeutendsten und unentbehrlichsten Konstrukten in der zeitgenössischen amerikanischen Sozialpsychologie (Allport, 1954, S. 43). Daß diese Behauptung nicht nur für die amerikanische Sozialpsychologie oder die 50er Jahre gilt, zeigt ein Blick in die Literatur der vergangenen Jahre, die sich mit de...

The present paper reports an experiment in which subjects received fictitious intelligence test feedback that was either negatively or positively discrepant with their self-evaluation. They were then given an opportunity to choose among several articles containing information that either derogated intelligence tests (test-disparaging information) o...

In this article two experiments are reported in which the degree of seriousness of a "self-threat" was varied and both behavioral and cognitive consequences were tested. Subjects in both experiments received fictitious intelligence test results that were always negatively discrepant from their self-evaluations (self-threat), but varied in their deg...