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Impression Management Concerns Governing Reactions To A Faulty Decision, Donelson R. Forsyth

Jepson School of Leadership Studies articles, book chapters and other publications

As a part of a study ostensibly concerned with conceptual ability, 120 male and 92 female undergraduates were asked to perform a boring task that consisted of generating random numbers for 20 minutes. The experimenter presented herself as being either attractive or unattractive, and made either favorable or unfavorable comments in describing the task. Following performance of the task, subjects rated it on either signed or unsigned questionnaires. Prior findings were replicated since a direct relationship was obtained between subjects' task evaluations and experimenter's opinion only when the experimenter was attractive; when she behaved unattractively, her opinion had no effect. …