Enhancing others through information selection: Establishing the phenomenon and its preconditions.

https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2025-96179-001?utm_campaign=morning_rounds&utm_medium=email&_hsenc=p2ANqtz-8xDbKX45Jj913kAJhktS5Tn0TbaVK2NxTCvgOnSbEvsevokN8h9D018gzBYCGCRzd1JXXKMdI2zcMkxzd2qnMaS-Xawg&_hsmi=353208413&utm_content=353208413&utm_source=hs_email If I like you, I'll comfort you If not? Well … we’ll see. When providing feedback to others, people are more likely to choose information that might make the other person feel good about themselves — unless they dislike them. That’s according to a study published last week in the American Psychological Association’s Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, in which more than 3,100 people were tasked over seven similar experiments with providing feedback to an unseen partner on their results from personality and intelligence tests. I won’t get into the nitty-gritty details of each experiment here. But essentially, participants were asked to pick an article out of a varied selection to be given to their partner. Some articles emphasized the validity of the test taken, while others undermined the test. Participants repeatedly provided articles to their partners that would enhance the partner’s self-image (i.e. if the partner performed badly, providing an article that says the test is unreliable). That tendency to help enhance the other person’s self-image disappeared when participants thought their partner showed “reproachable” characteristics. But even then, the participants were never providing negative feedback more often than they were providing positive feedback. It’s the first study to systematically investigate how a person may or may not choose to build up another person that they are unlikely to interact with in real life, the authors write. And maybe this is a bit cerebral for a Monday morning newsletter, but they also wrote that the findings show that people follow different principles when selecting information to tell other people, as opposed to what we tell ourselves. (May this be the reminder you need to be kind to yourself today.)