Feedback on successful or unsuccessful actions is essential for goal pursuit as it allows individuals to direct their efforts to match the challenges they face (Bandura, 1991; Locke & Latham, 1990). Consequently, there are many social roles associated with providing feedback on goal pursuit. For instance, educators, coaches, employers, and marketers all provide feedback on accomplishments or lack thereof. This feedback allows students, athletes, employees, and consumers to allocate their efforts to ensure they meet their goals. In addition, people often seek feedback from social agents, such as friends, family members, and colleagues. This research examines how expertise (perceived or actual) influences the feedback people seek from others as well as how they respond to such feedback. While there are many different motives that influence feedback seeking and responding (Swann & Read, 1981; Tesser, 1988), I focus on the desire to have a realistic self-assessment. When people are focused on accurately assessing their accomplishments or lack thereof, negative feedback is beneficial as it provides information on how people can improve without necessarily damaging their self-esteem (Trope & Neter, 1994). / The first set of studies investigates the feedback people seek and how they respond to feedback on their own actions as a function of their expertise. In this paper ("Chapter 1"), I test whether novices focus on assessing their commitment to a goal while experts focus on monitoring their progress on a goal. Consequently, novices are more likely to seek and respond to positive feedback as it signals that the goal is important or valuable, and thus increases one's commitment. In contrast, experts are more likely to seek and respond to negative feedback because this feedback signals that one's pace of pursuing the goal is insufficient. / The second set of studies investigates attitudinal and behavioral change in response to feedback in persuasive messages. Persuasive appeals can include a wide variety of media messages, including messages that do not contain feedback (e.g., positive or negative advertising) and messages that do include feedback. In this paper, I focus on feedback in persuasive appeals and propose a set of studies that investigate how people respond to positive or negative feedback on a group's action as a function of their expertise level. Feedback in persuasive appeals can be provided at two levels -- at the individual level (e.g., ways an individual performs well or can improve) and the group level (society's action are effective or ineffective). In this chapter, I further focus on feedback provided at the group, rather than at the individual level, because providing feedback at this level is less likely to arouse defensive concerns and allows me to shed light on when negative feedback can be useful for promoting attitudinal and behavioral change. I propose that because experts focus on monitoring their effort investment, they will be more likely to exhibit behavioral and attitudinal change in response to negative feedback on their group's actions. In contrast, because novices focus on assessing their commitment, they will be more likely to exhibit behavioral change in response to positive feedback on their group's actions.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:CHENGCHI/U0003460180 |
| Creators | Finkelstein, Stacey R. |
| Publisher | The University of Chicago. |
| Source Sets | National Chengchi University Libraries |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Rights | Copyright © nccu library on behalf of the copyright holders |
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