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The authors tested the proposition that people distance themselves more from a target person with cancer when they have no family history of cancer and receive no empathy-inducing instructions. The authors also tested the proposition that men distance themselves more from a person with cancer than do women. The results confirm the prediction regarding family history and empathy, but they did not confirm the prediction about gender. Keywords: cancer, distancing, empathy, gender differences, ********** PYSZCZYNSKI ET AL. (1995) PROPOSED that people may distance themselves less from a person with cancer the more that they become conscious or aware of that person's illness. Distancing [...]

The present investigation tested the proposition that people use consensus-raising excuses less when they expect to discuss their responses with an informed audience than when they expect to reveal their responses to such an audience without discussion or keep their responses private. Subjects received favorable or unfavorable feedback on an ego-involving social perceptiveness test and made attributions to ability, effort, luck, and task difficulty while expecting to keep their responses private or expecting to reveal them publicly either with or without interaction with an informed audience. Attributions to task difficulty are considered consensus-raising excuses. The results supported the hypothesis.

HALL (1966) delineated four distance zones that people keep between themselves and others: intimate, personal, social, and public. Hall suggested that, as the distance changes, there are corresponding changes in [...]

The excuse-making behavior of socially anxious people is studied. It is proposed that individuals with high social anxiety would use consensus-raising excuses to account for failure less publicly than privately. A survey of college students show correlations between social anxiety, publicness and favorability of feedback. The results also supported the proposal that socially anxious individuals attributed failure less to luck in public., SOCIALLY ANXIOUS PEOPLE, research suggests, publicly explain their performances in a modest or conservative manner (Arkin, Appleman, & Burger, 1980; Greenberg, Pyszczynski, & Stine, 1985; Schlenker & Leary, 1982). Arkin [...]