Twice-told tales: Self-repetition decreases observer assessments of performer authenticity.

People often engage in self-repetition-repeating the same story, joke, or presentation across different audiences. While behaving consistently has generally been found to enhance perceptions of authenticity, 10 studies demonstrate that performers who are revealed to be self-repeating are perceived as less authentic. We find convergent evidence that this effect is driven by observers' implicit assumption that social interactions are unique. Self-repetitions violate this assumption, leading observers to judge performers as inauthentic because they are thought to be falsely presenting their performance as unique when it is not. We demonstrate this effect across multiple contexts (politics, entrepreneurship, tour guiding, and comedy), finding that observer awareness of self-repetition decreases perceived authenticity even in situations in which it is normative to repeat a performance and in which repetition is required. The decrease in authenticity is eliminated only when performers overtly acknowledge self-repetition, as performers are no longer viewed as falsely presenting themselves. Moreover, performers who fail to acknowledge their self-repetition are penalized similarly to those who explicitly lie that the performance is unique-an unacknowledged self-repetition is thus seen as a lie by omission. Finally, we recorded repeated job interview responses and found that observers who were unaware of the self-repetition could not discern tangible differences between unrepeated and repeated responses. However, when observers believed that they were viewing a self-repetition, they judged the interviewees as less authentic. Together, our findings provide insight into how people assess the authenticity of self-presentational behaviors and the implicit assumptions that influence social judgments. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

The need to belong motivates demand for authentic objects.

The present studies examine how demand for certain types of authentic objects is related to a more fundamental need to form social connections with others. Specifically, Experiment 1 demonstrates that manipulating the need to belong leads to greater valuation of celebrity memorabilia. Experiment 2 provides converging evidence by demonstrating that individual differences in the need to belong moderate the relationship between beliefs in essence transfer (i.e., contagion) and valuation. This paper lends insight into the underlying motives behind demand for authentic objects and, more broadly, reinforces the compensatory role of consumption in satisfying core psychological needs.

Are artworks more like people than artifacts? Individual concepts and their extensions.

This paper examines people's reasoning about identity continuity (i.e., how people decide that a particular object is the same object over time) and its relation to previous research on how people value one-of-a-kind artifacts, such as artwork. We propose that judgments about the continuity of artworks are related to judgments about the continuity of individual persons because art objects are seen as physical extensions of their creators. We report a reanalysis of previous data and the results of two new empirical studies that test this hypothesis. The first study demonstrates that the mere categorization of an object as "art" versus "a tool" changes people's intuitions about the persistence of those objects over time. In a second study, we examine some conditions that may lead artworks to be thought of as different from other artifacts. These observations inform both current understanding of what makes some objects one-of-a-kind as well as broader questions regarding how people intuitively think about the persistence of human agents.