The friend number paradox.

We identify a friend number paradox, that is, a mismatch between people's preferences for the friends they might acquire in social interactions and their predictions of others' preferences. People predict that others are attracted to them if they have a relatively large number of friends. However, they personally prefer to make friends with someone who has a relatively small number of friends. People regard a large number of friends as a signal of social capital that increases their interpersonal attractiveness. However, it can actually be a signal of social liabilities that diminish their ability to reciprocate obligations to others. We conducted a series of studies, including 3 speed-friending studies in which participants either engaged or expected to engage in actual interactions for the purpose of initiating long-term friendships. These studies provide converging evidence of the hypothesized mismatch and our conceptualization of its determinants. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Looking Forward and Looking Back: The Likelihood of an Event's Future Reoccurrence Affects Perceptions of the Time It Occurred in the Past.

Past events are perceived to be temporally more distant when they are unlikely rather than likely to reoccur in the future. This can be because (a) future events that are unlikely to occur are perceived to be temporally remote and (b) these feelings of remoteness can generalize and influence subjective distance judgments of the events' occurrences in the past. Six studies confirmed this effect and provided insights into the processes that underlie it. Alternative interpretations and implications of the current findings are discussed.

Actors conform, observers react: the effects of behavioral synchrony on conformity.

Engaging in synchronous behavior can induce a more general disposition to copy others, which increases the tendency to conform to others' preferences in an unrelated choice situation. In contrast, observing others perform synchronous behavior can induce psychological reactance and decrease conformity to others' preferences. Five experiments confirmed these different effects and circumscribed the conditions in which they occurred. Actors typically focus their attention on the goal to which their synchronous behavior is directed, inducing a copying-others mindset that generalizes to later situations. In contrast, observers focus on the actors' behavior independently of the goal to which it pertains. Consequently, they become sensitive to the restrictions on freedom that synchronous behavior requires and experience reactance. However, changing the relative attention that actors and observers pay to these factors can reverse the effects of the actors' synchronous behavior on conformity.

When does playing hard to get increase romantic attraction?

Folk wisdom suggests playing hard to get is an effective strategy in romantic attraction. However, prior research has yielded little support for this belief. This article seeks to reconcile these contrasting views by investigating how 2 hitherto unconsidered factors, (a) the asymmetry between wanting (motivational) and liking (affective) responses and (b) the degree of psychological commitment, can determine the efficacy of playing hard to get. We propose that person B playing hard to get with person A will simultaneously increase A's wanting but decrease A's liking of B. However, such a result will only occur if A is psychologically committed to pursuing further relations with B; otherwise, playing hard to get will decrease both wanting and liking. Two studies confirm these propositions. We discuss implications for interpersonal attraction and the interplay between emotion and motivation in determining preferences.

The art and science of guessing.

This research examined how one affectively reacts to others' guesses at a value one cares about, such as one's income. Conventional wisdom suggests that people will feel happier upon receiving more favorable guesses (e.g., higher income) than less favorable guesses. We found the opposite pattern. We propose a model to explain the effect and identify its boundaries and report experimental evidence for the model. This research enriches existing literature on self-enhancement and yields practical implications for how to approach guessing in interpersonal communications.

Wanting, liking, and preference construction.

According to theories on preference construction, multiple preferences result from multiple contexts (e.g., loss vs. gain frames). This implies that people can have different representations of a preference in different contexts. Drawing on Berridge's (1999) distinction between unconscious liking and wanting, we hypothesize that people may have multiple representations of a preference toward an object even within a single context. Specifically, we propose that people can have different representations of an object's motivational value, or incentive value, versus its emotional value, or likability, even when the object is placed in the same context. Study 1 establishes a divergence between incentive value and likability of faces using behavioral measures. Studies 2A and 2B, using self-report measures, provide support for our main hypothesis that people are perfectly aware of these distinct representations and are able to access them concurrently at will. We also discuss implications of our findings for the truism that people seek pleasure and for expectancy-value theories.