Groups and Affect: Sentiments, Emotions, and Performance Expectations

Actors form and enact performance expectations based on status advantages brought to a situation or on evaluations of attempted task solutions. Interest in specifying how and under what conditions other social differences result in performance expectations has emerged in recent investigations. We designed our research to detect whether liking manipulated by attitude similarity and difference would affect performance expectations the same way as liking manipulated by reciprocity of gift exchange. The data show that the two different means of manipulating liking produce differences in strength of positive and negative feelings for a fictitious partner, but do not produce different effects on performance expectations. We identify unexpected gender differences in liking. Women report more liking for partners who share similar opinions and hold higher performance expectations for their fictitious partner than do men. 2 Tables, 1 Figure, 10 References.