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 9 included publications by Ethan Zell :

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
Contextual neglect, self-evaluation, and the frog-pond effect. 2009 5929 Social comparisons entail not only information about one’s standing in a social group (intragroup or local comparison) but also information about the standing of the group in comparison to other groups (intergroup or general comparison). In Studies 1...
Cultural Differences in Attitudes Toward Action and Inaction: The Role of Dialecticism 2013 1580 The current research examined whether nations differ in their attitudes toward action and inaction. It was anticipated that members of dialectical East Asian societies would show a positive association in their attitudes toward action/inaction. Howev...
Do People Have Insight Into Their Abilities? A Metasynthesis 2014 4171 Having insight into one’s abilities is essential, yet it remains unclear whether people generally perceive their skills accurately or inaccurately. In the present analysis, we examined the overall correspondence between self-evaluations of ability (e...
The Local Dominance Effect in Self-Evaluation: Evidence and Explanations 2010 3564 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 3755 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 ...
Referent Status Neglect: Winners Evaluate Themselves Favorably Even When the Competitor is Incompetent 2015 2345 People evaluate themselves more favorably when they outperform a referent (downward comparison) than when they underperform a referent (upward comparison). However, research has yet to examine whether people are sensitive to the status of the referen...
Self-Evaluative Effects of Temporal and Social Comparison 2009 5036 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 ...
Splitting of the mind: When the You I talk to is me and needs commands. 2012 1879 Self-talk has fascinated scholars for decades but has received little systematic research attention. Three studies examined the conditions under which people talk to themselves as if they are another person, indicating a splitting or fragmentation of...
You may think you’re right…Young adults are more liberal than they realize 2013 3001 Do people have biased perceptions of their political orientation? Based on the link between political conservatism and in-group loyalty, we predicted that people would underestimate their liberalism and that this effect would be more pronounced among...