The Allure of Perfection

Imagine that you hear about a high school student who recently took the American College Test (ACT), used by many colleges for admissions decisions. Suppose she scored a 34 out of 36. This is a very good score, and so it would be natural for you to use this information (perhaps even without realizing you are doing so) to form a positive impression of the student’s intellectual ability or test competence. But what if you also learn about two other students who respectively scored a 35 and a perfect 36 on the same test? In the absence of other information about the students, it seems logical that you might evaluate the student who scored a 35 to be slightly more capable than the student whose score was 34 but slightly less so than the student whose score was 36.

The Perfection Premium

However, our new research reveals a different pattern of results. In the ACT scenario, the difference in perceived ability between a student who earns a perfect score of 36 and a near-perfect score of 35 is much greater than the difference between students whose scores are 35 versus 34. Given that the difference between both sets of scores is identical (1 point), this asymmetry is quite interesting. This “perfection premium” is not limited to ability ratings but applies broadly across social perception and product decision-making contexts. One of our studies shows that even when choosing between pairs of socks, consumers’ general preference for the option with higher wool content is amplified when the superior option contains 100% Merino wool! It appears that people place a premium on perfection that results in inflated evaluations of individuals or products that are perfect on a numerical attribute.

Of course, there are some cases where it makes perfect sense (no pun intended) for people to exhibit a perfection premium. For instance, people might not perceive much of a difference between a bottle of spring water that is 98% pure (with 2% contaminants) and a bottle that is 99% pure (with 1% contaminants). Yet, it may be entirely rational for consumers to disproportionately value a bottle of spring water that is 100% pure (with 0% contaminants). Because the 100% pure water ensures zero chance of physical contamination, this perfection premium may be justified. Importantly, however, a contamination explanation cannot account for the perfection premium that we also observe in social perception judgments (such as intelligence ratings of individuals).

The Role of Categorization

So, if it’s not always due to physical contamination concerns, why do people exhibit the perfection premium? Our research indicates that the perfection premium arises at least in part because of a categorization process.

People form categories to simplify and organize their life. We are predisposed to sort individuals into social groups based on beliefs, values, and traits to facilitate thinking and to speed up decision-making. Even when comparing and contrasting objects, consumers tend to rely on categorization as a time-saving rule of thumb. Rather than strictly relying on numerical magnitudes, people even put numbers into different categories—for instance, numbers can be classified as odd or even, and round numbers such as those ending in zero are categorized and evaluated differently than other numbers. Simply put, categorization is a fundamental, ingrained, and often automatic part of how humans think.

We hypothesized that people might sort or categorize an item or a person based on the level of perfection of its numerical attribute. Perfection is the state of being flawless or free from defect. Because perfection is unsurprisingly desired by many, we thought it might be a natural basis for categorization. That’s exactly what we found—people seem to classify both individuals and items (such as consumer goods) based on whether or not they are perfect (versus near-perfect) on a numerical scale. For example, one of our studies shows that people are much more likely to put two test takers into the same group if they both received near-perfect test scores (e.g., 86 versus 87 out of 88) than if one of the test takers earned a perfect score (e.g., 87 versus 88 out of 88). Furthermore, our results are consistent with prior research showing that categorization exaggerates the distance in evaluations between members of different groups.

Our hope is that by becoming aware of the generalized human tendency to overvalue “perfect” scores, ratings, and other numerical values, people may be better able to resist the allure of perfection when making social judgments and consumer decisions. After all, in many cases, the real difference between a perfect score and a near-perfect score may be negligible.


For Further Reading

Isaac, M. S., & Spangenberg, K. (2021). “The perfection premium.” Social Psychological and Personality Science, 12(6), 930–937. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550620944313.

Isaac, M. S., & Schindler, R. M. (2014). The top-ten effect: Consumers’ subjective categorization of ranked lists.” Journal of Consumer Research, 40(6), 1181-1202. https://doi.org/10.1086/674546.

Li, M., & Chapman, G. B. (2009). ‘100% of anything looks good’: The appeal of one hundred percent.” Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 16(1), 156-162. https://doi.org/10.3758/PBR.16.1.156
 

Mathew S. Isaac is a Professor at the Albers School of Business and Economics at Seattle University. His research examines consumer judgment and decision-making, particularly how contextual and motivational factors influence product evaluations and purchase intentions. He writes a blog for Psychology Today on the psychology of numbers, categories, and lists.

Katie Spangenberg is a Lecturer at the Albers School of Business and Economics at Seattle University. She holds a PhD in Marketing from the University of Washington Foster School of Business.

 

There is Something about a Man (or Woman) in Uniform

Image from Pixabay

You’re trying to fly across the country, but everything is falling apart. Your flight was cancelled, and you’ve waited in line for nearly an hour to talk to someone about rebooking. When you finally get to the front of the line, the airline employee is rude and incompetent. In your mind, you say something that many people in this exact position have said over the years, “I’m never flying this airline again.”

We interact with employees all the time. Usually everything goes fine, sometimes it goes very well, and sometimes it goes badly. But our reactions to these experiences don’t depend just on how good or bad the experience was; they also depend on how we make sense of the experience. Whose fault was it? Are this company’s other employees just as bad as this one’s? What about other companies in this industry? They have to be better, right?

It turns out that our answers to these questions—and therefore our reactions to countless interactions with companies and employees—depend on something that most of us don’t think about very much: employee uniforms.

In research I recently published with Norbert Schwarz, a psychologist from the University of Southern California, we found that employee uniforms change people’s responses to their service experiences in a variety of ways. Our research shows that people tend to blame bad service more on the company if an employee is wearing a uniform than if he or she is not. Bad service from a uniformed employee also leads people to view the company more negatively, makes other employees of the company seem worse, and even makes other companies seem better compared to identically bad service from a non-uniformed employee.

Something similar happens after good service. The uniform makes the good service seem more like it was caused by the company than by that individual employee, and people rate the company and its other employees more positively than if they get that same good service from someone not wearing a uniform.

Seeing employees in uniforms sends a message that employees and their company are unified. Uniforms make the many employees of a company seem like interchangeable members of their group. As a result, uniforms change our reactions to service experiences, because we perceive that the uniformed employee is more strongly linked to the company and to other employees. Uniforms can make one bad apple spoil the whole bunch.

So uniforms increase the stakes of a service experience. If it’s a bad experience, judgments of the company and its other employees become worse, but if it’s a good experience, these judgments get better. This finding suggests that companies should be sure that their more highly trained employees wear uniforms, because these are the people that companies want to represent them. But if you look at the industries in which uniforms are most prevalent, we see the opposite pattern—the most prominent uniforms are generally worn by the least well-trained and most under-paid employees.

Other research I conducted with Norbert Schwarz, Carey Morewedge, Jesse Chandler, and Jonathon Schooler found that uniforms also make employees seem less human. Because uniformed employees are seen as representatives of their company, we are distracted from the fact that they are human beings with deep and complex inner lives. We see people in uniforms as a little more robotic than non-uniformed people, which may explain why we’re so quick to scream at the poor agent behind the airline counter.

So the next time you find yourself interacting with someone wearing an employee uniform, remember that they’re human. They aren’t just a representative of their company and its other employees—they are a person trying to do their job. If the service isn’t great, that may be the company’s fault, but it may also just be a person having a bad day.


For Further Reading

Smith, R. W., Chandler, J. J., & Schwarz, N. (2020). Uniformity: The effects of organizational attire on judgments and attributions. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 50(5), 299-312.

Bless, H., & Schwarz, N. (2010). Mental construal and the emergence of assimilation and contrast effects: The inclusion/exclusion model. In Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 42, pp. 319-373). Academic Press.

Morewedge, C. K., Chandler, J. J., Smith, R., Schwarz, N., & Schooler, J. (2013). Lost in the crowd: Entitative group membership reduces mind attribution. Consciousness and Cognition, 22(4), 1195-1205.

 

Robert W. Smith is an Assistant Professor of Marketing at Tilburg University in the Netherlands. He studies consumer psychology.

 

Research Shows Biases Against Immigrants with Non-anglicized Names

Using variations of the “trolley-dilemma” where people choose who to save or not save others in a hypothetical situation, social psychologists show that for certain groups, under certain conditions in a hypothetical scenario, having an anglicized name means you’re more likely to be saved than if you kept your original Asian or Arab name.

Washington, DC - Immigrating to a new country brings many challenges, including figuring out how to be part of a new community. For some people, voluntarily adopting a name similar to where someone is living, rather than keeping an original name, is one part of trying to assimilate or fit in with the new community. According to a new study focused on the United States, where anglicized names are more typical, anglicizing ethnic names may reduce bias towards immigrants. The results appear in Social Psychological and Personality Science.

“We do not suggest immigrants to Anglicize their ethnic names in order to avoid discrimination,” says Xian Zhao (University of Toronto), lead author on the study. “This certainly puts the onus on immigrants to promote equity and our previous studies also suggest that Anglicizing names may have negative implications for one’s self-concept.”

To detect bias, the researchers ran a trilogy of hypothetical transportation accidents: trolley, plane dilemma, and lifeboat. In each variation of these moral dilemmas, participants were asked to imagine that men’s lives were at risk. The men that could be saved or sacrificed might be white with a name like “Dan” or “Alex,” an immigrant with the name “Mark” or “Adam,” or an immigrant with a name associated with China or the Middle East, such as “Qiu,” “Jiang,” or “Ahmed.”

The researchers focused most of their effort on using white participants, to more clearly delineate ingroups and outgroups in their research

In the trolley scenario, people tended to sacrifice the one to save the many, which is a common finding. However, white participants were more likely to sacrifice an immigrant with their original name than someone white or an immigrant with an anglicized name.

Their second study involved a plane crash scenario and possibly leaving someone behind with a broken leg. The white men continued to show similar bias patterns, but the women did not.

In the final scenario, throwing a life preserver to a man named Muhammad and risking the lives of everyone on board a lifeboat, brought similar results. However, for participants who scored as favorable towards multicultural groups, being an immigrant named “John” actually improved ones’ chances for survival. But for participants who scored as favorable towards assimilating minority groups, only being white increased the chance to be saved. Zhao says they’ve seen this bias before in some of their other research.

The authors stress that encouraging people to change their name is not the desired outcome of this research. What’s needed, says Zhao, is “the whole society should work together to improve the system to promote diversity and inclusion.”

To that end, Zhao and colleagues are working on intervention studies in which to train people to recognize and pronounce common ethnic names and phonemes, hopefully improving intergroup communication and reducing the need for Anglicizing ethnic names.


Study: Zhao, Xian; Biernat, Monica. Your Name Is Your Life-saver: Anglicization of Names and Moral Dilemmas in a Trilogy of Transportation Accidents. Social Psychological and Personality Science. Online December 2018.

Social Psychological and Personality Science (SPPS) is an official journal of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP), the Association for Research in Personality (ARP), the European Association of Social Psychology (EASP), and the Society for Experimental Social Psychology (SESP). Social Psychological and Personality Science publishes innovative and rigorous short reports of empirical research on the latest advances in personality and social psychology.

Steve Stroessner

Steve Stroessner is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of Psychology at Barnard College. His past research has been in the area of social cognition with a particular interest in the role that cognitive, affective, and motivational factors play in stereotyping processes.  His current research focuses on social categorization processes and the relation between perceived threat and stereotype endorsement.

What led you to choose a career in personality and social psychology?

I was always interested in social and political issues at a societal level, but also wanted to understand how these factors affected individuals. I discovered that social psychology melded these perspectives by taking a fantastic class with my (eventual) undergraduate mentor at Hope College, Dr. Chuck Green.

How would you summarize your current research interests?

Traditionally, I have focused my research on social perception with an emphasis on cognitive and motivational processes in stereotyping and prejudice. In the last few years, I have begun to turn to the social perception of non-social entities. Specifically, I have become interested in how non-human entities (shapes, objects, robots) invoke social categorization processes with predictable downstream consequences (e.g., gender stereotyping and prejudice).

As an instructor, are there any strategies or techniques that you’ve found to be especially helpful?

I have always found it useful to remind myself what I used to not know. It is very easy to take for granted what we know, as a field, and this can easily become reflected in our teaching. I try to remember what it felt like to be exposed for the first time to the research in the field and to remember how transformative it was in my own thinking about the world.

Is there a particular class that you enjoy teaching?

Although I have not taught it for a few years, my favorite class to teach is Statistics. I love leading students through a topic that often is intimidating to them, to get them engaged in the topic despite these fears, and to get at least a subset of students to enjoy and appreciate it. It is also a class in which it is easy to see that students have learned.

How has SPSP membership helped support you professionally?

It has kept me informed of new developments in the field, long before these developments appear in journals. More important, it has allowed me to meet and get to know new generations who are entering the field and making exciting contributions to the field.

Do you have a particularly memorable SPSP convention experience?

I was present at one of the first sessions focused on “best practices” in 2012, and that session ended up being both memorable and consequential.

What are your passions outside of psychology?

I love music, good food, and good wine. The two places where I have lived in the last few years — New York and Los Angeles — make it very easy to experience those things.

Do you have any advice for our student members or individuals interested in a career in personality and social psychology?

Your research should reflect your passions. If you study what you care about, it will never feel like a job.


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