Cynthia L. Pickett's research while affiliated with University of California, Davis and other places

... Thus, the authors conclude that virtual agents with human-like qualities have the potential to serve as a temporary substitute for social interaction when real-life social interactions are unavailable. This idea is referred to as a "social snack" [36]. Similarly, Christoforakos and Diefenbach [37] stated that even though technology cannot truly satisfy social needs in the same way as human interaction, it can alleviate negative emotional states such as loneliness or boredom. ...

... Based on the SIP-model, prior victimization experiences likely affect how victims encode, interpret, and respond to social cues as their past experiences color the interpretation of new social situations. First, victims may have a positive social-cognitive style and focus on positive social cues and interpretations to facilitate reaffiliation (Bernstein, 2003;Pickett & Gardner, 2005), called the reaffiliation hypothesis in this review. In line with this hypothesis, socially excluded people tend to focus more on positive social cues (Buckner et al., 2010) and have better memory recall for positive events (DeWall et al., 2011). ...

... Moreover, I showed the existence of a hierarchical three-level structure, according to which the eleven shopping motives may be aggregated in five main components, associable to the Big Five factors of human personality, and, through these latter, in two meta-dimensions (cf. Digman 1997;Mooradian and Olver 1996), associable to the two main values pursued by people during shopping (Guido 2006b): i.e., a Hedonic meta-dimension, linked to the Open- ness to Experience, the Agreeableness, and the Extroversion factors; and a Utilitarian meta-dimension, linked to the Emotional Stability and the Conscientiousness factors. Together with shopping motives, we considered levels of materialism to profile consumers' religious- like behaviours. ...

... The upward-mobility hypothesis assumes that naturalized citizens are motivated to reach central positions within the national majority group (Barreto & Ellemers, 2009;Pickett, Bonner, & Coleman, 2002). Naturalized citizens who wish to get as close as possible to the national prototype may endorse acculturation orientations which are prototypically associated with the national majority group, and derogate immigrants in order to publicize their new national allegiance (Branscombe, Ellemers, et al., 1999;Ellemers & Jetten, 2013;Jetten, Branscombe, Spears, & McKimmie, 2003). ...

... However, another promising method for studying emergent processes is agentbased modeling (for reviews, see Smaldino, Calanchini, & Pickett, 2015). Agent-based modeling is a technique that reproduces behaviors of entities, such as employees or organizations, in a way that mimics ongoing, real-world interactions in an artificial environment (Fioretti, 2013). ...

... Recent research has shown that firms may have different propensities to conform and varying ways of doing so depending on whether they are more likely to see conformity as a way to avoid the threat of social disapproval and delegitimation or pursue the opportunity to reap the social gains associated with quality recognition (Durand & Kremp, 2016;Kennedy & Fiss, 2009). These motivational drivers for conformity depend on firm membership in one or multiple social categories (Cattani, Porac, & Thomas, 2017;Vergne & Wry, 2014) that segment and order the social structure of a field or industry, as well as firm owners' and managers' concerns for their own and their firm's social identity (Leonardelli et al., 2011;Vergne & Wry, 2014). For example, Zhao et al. (2016) have recently suggested that conformity and distinctiveness are not necessarily mutually exclusive and optimal distinctiveness rests on the constant interplay between managerial agency and stakeholder evaluation. ...

... From the perspective of ODT, a social identity of this kind fulfills the need for distinctiveness in addition to the need for inclusion. Thus, such a valued group membership may be more likely to be affirmed and defended through expressions of in-group loyalty and favoritism (Brewer, 1991;Leonardelli et al., 2010;Pickett & Leonardelli, 2006). ...

... Because participants had transitioned to so many different high schools, it was not possible for us to assemble their class schedules and objectively determine how many students of their racial/ethnic group were present in any specific course. Although there may be instances of overestimation or underestimation of group size compared to actual size (e.g., Pickett et al., 2002), subjective perceptions of group size are important in their own right and have explanatory power because they tell us how each person uniquely perceives their context (Syed et al., 2018). Thus, subjectively perceived group size is likely to be more related to feelings of belonging than objective measures. ...

... First, the Belonging Regulation Model [7][8][9] assumes that a threat to the need to belong, e.g., by means of loneliness or social rejection, activates a social monitoring system, followed by an attempt to restore this need by increasing attention to social cues (e.g., by checking the affective state of our interaction partners). Increased attention to social cues represents a potential prerequisite to social success because this information helps us behave in a socially acceptable manner [10]. Additionally, research on social reconnection strategies showed that social exclusion increased the motivation to build a new social bond with so-far-unknown other individuals [11]. ...

... According to optimal distinctiveness theory, individuals evaluate a given behavior more positively when they perceive that it will help them achieve their goals related to inclusion and distinctiveness (Leonardelli et al., 2010). For example, individuals had positive perceptions toward purchasing and wearing a team sweatshirt featuring in-group symbols when they perceived that it would satisfy their need for inclusion (Leonardelli et al., 2010). ...