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Resilience as a Social Judgment: Toward a Subjective Resilience Model
Ball, Thomas C
Ball, Thomas C
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Abstract
Much psychological research on resilience promotes the idea that some people—but not others—possess an extraordinary quality that enables them to bounce back following adverse experiences. This person-centric approach to resilience research attempts to locate ‘objective’ resilience within persons and study the personality or behavior profiles of those who meet criteria for resilience. The present research offers a novel framework for understanding subjective resilience by integrating existing theory on resilience (e.g., Masten, 2001) with theories from social psychology (e.g., Norm Theory; Kahneman & Miller, 1986). We test hypotheses derived from this framework—a subjective resilience model (SRM)—in a series of three studies. Study 1 (N = 96) was a correlational study that examined how people conceptualize resilience—what it is, who has it, where it comes from. Studies 2 (N = 409) and 3 (N = 385) were experiments that tested the causal effect of an outcome manipulation (i.e., random assignment to read about someone who experienced a good outcome, bad outcome, or a control condition in which no outcome information was given) on resilience appraisals of the manipulation target, the self, and others. The results of Study 3 conceptually replicate key findings from Study 2 in a different social context, providing a more robust empirical basis for this research. The combined results of these studies support hypotheses from the SRM, demonstrating that resilience judgments are social judgments that depend on expected and observed outcomes, comparative context, and various biases that influence similar judgments (e.g., actor-observer bias). Implications for theory and practice are discussed alongside ideas for future research.
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Date
2022-08-31
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University of Kansas
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Keywords
Social psychology, norms, resilience, social judgment