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Ethan Zell

My research examines how people form and maintain a coherent sense of self. In my primary research program, I examine how people evaluate their abilities, and the influence of different types of performance feedback (e.g., social comparisons) on self-evaluations. Other topics that I research include self-talk, information seeking, blame judgments, as well as age and cultural differences in self-processes. Primary Interests: Group Processes, Interpersonal Processes, Motivation, Goal Setting, Person Perception, Self and Identity, Social Cognition

There are 4 included publications by Ethan Zell :

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
The Influence of Social Comparison on Visual Representation of One’s Face 2012 70 Can the effects of social comparison extend beyond explicit evaluation to visual self-representation—a perceptual stimulus that is objectively verifiable, unambiguous, and frequently updated? We morphed images of participants’ faces with attractive a...
The Local Dominance Effect in Self-Evaluation: Evidence and Explanations 2010 139 The local dominance effect is the tendency for comparisons with a few, discrete individuals to have a greater influence on self-assessments than comparisons with larger aggregates. This review presents a series of recent studies that demonstrate the ...
Mere Categorization and the Frog-Pond Effect 2010 54 Zell and Alicke (2009) have shown that comparisons with a few people have a stronger influence on self-evaluations than comparisons with larger samples. One explanation for this effect is that people readily categorize their standing in small groups ...
Self-Evaluative Effects of Temporal and Social Comparison 2009 290 Social and temporal comparisons are two fundamental information sources for evaluating one’s characteristics and abilities. The current study demonstrates that when social comparison (where people’s performance stood in the overall distribution) and ...