Increasingly, people interact with others via digital representations, or avatars, that feature indicators of race. Nonetheless, little is known about the effects of avatar race on attitudes and behaviors. We conducted a study to determine how people's implicit racial bias is affected by the race of their avatar in an immersive virtual environment (IVE). Our results indicate that the effects of avatar race extend beyond digital spaces. People embodied by Black avatars in an IVE demonstrated greater implicit racial bias outside the IVE than people embodied by White avatars. These findings have important implications for strategies to reduce racial prejudice and provide new insights into the flexibility of racial identity and racial attitudes afforded by virtual technologies.

This special issue of Social Influence examines how social influences can affect such outcomes as creativity, innovation, originality, and inventiveness. While major advances have been made, many q...

Three studies examined the perceptions formed about impression managers who enhance themselves indirectly by associating themselves with successful others. It was predicted that listeners would take into account not only the information conveyed regarding the target's attributes and degree of closeness to the target, but also the pragmatic implications of this information, including the speaker's perceived attempt to manage his or her impression. The valence of the depiction as well as the closeness between the speaker and the target were manipulated, and they were expected to have an interactive effect on the perception of the speaker as manipulative. The results generally supported the research hypotheses in demonstrating that the speaker was perceived as more manipulative when ascribing positive characteristics to a close other rather than to a distant other and when associating himself with a successful other rather than an unsuccessful other. The data for the first study came from an undergraduate thesis by Michal Mor and Avner Raz. The data for the second study came from an undergraduate thesis by Gili Kimel and Nimrod Har‐Zion, and the data for the third study came from an undergraduate thesis by Riki Shulman and Yael Naim. All of these projects were supervised by the author. The author would like to thank these students for their help in data collection.

Two experiments were conducted to examine the processing of fear‐arousing communications, and tested predictions derived from the stage model of processing of fear‐arousing communications. The studies focused on the impact of manipulations of vulnerability to and severity of a health risk on the processing of both the fear appeal and the subsequent action recommendation, and assessed how message processing relates to attitudes, intentions, and behavior. Results confirmed predictions that vulnerability to a severe health risk induces defense motivation, which is reflected in a negative processing bias in threat appraisal and a positive processing bias in coping appraisal, which in combination promotes persuasion. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. The authors would like to thank Minke de Gruil for her help in categorizing the cognitive responses.

People differ in the extent to which they feel psychologically connected and close to others. Whereas some people are individualistic and value uniqueness, other people are intrinsically more social and value belongingness to a greater extent. The present study investigated whether these different types of self‐construal and values expressed in advertisements relate to brand choice. The data indicate that values expressed in advertisements congruent with chronic self‐construal correlate with brand preference more than advertisements emphasizing values incongruent with chronic self‐construal. People prefer advertisements that express values congruent with their self‐construal.

Three experiments examined the effect of exchanging small favors on compliance to a subsequent request. In Experiment 1, undergraduate participants walked up a flight of stairs to sharpen a pencil for a confederate, and the confederate brought the participants a bottle of water. These participants were more likely to agree to a request from the confederate than participants who had not exchanged favors or who had performed a favor without receiving one in return. The order in which the favors were performed did not affect compliance rates. In Experiment 2, students selling bake sale treats retrieved a “fresh” treat for customers, and customers picked up some spilled pencils for the students. The percentage of customers who subsequently purchased treats replicated the pattern uncovered in the first investigation. In a partial replication of the first experiment, Experiment 3 findings ruled out explanations for the results based on mood and modeling of helping behavior. Taken together, the research suggests that a reciprocal exchange of favors with a stranger may trigger a friendship heuristic that people rely on when responding to a subsequent request.

Several recent lines of survey research demonstrate that the simple act of asking a question can lead to changes in a respondent's subsequent behavior. In the current research we asked college students their likelihood to either (i) exercise or (ii) use illegal drugs in the coming 2 months. After 2 months we asked the same college students to report their exercising and illegal drug use behaviors. The findings provide further evidence that these “question–behavior” effects occur for socially normative personal health behaviors, a domain that should have high levels of respondent vigilance and defensive processing. Of more concern, we demonstrate that when a question is asked about a socially non‐normative health behavior (i.e., illegal drug use), instead of decreases in the behavior we see increased rates of the non‐normative behavior.

On the basis of the experiments by Carli (1990) on the determinants of persuasion efficiency, we predicted that women are more effective using direct strategies in social influence to address women, and indirect strategies to address men; however, men's efficiency should not depend on strategy. Two field experiments presented in this article did not confirm these assumptions. Our data suggest that both sexes are more successful when asking their own sex, but commanding members of the opposite sex. Our warm thanks are extended to Anthony Pratkanis, the editor of the journal, and three anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments on earlier version of this paper. We also thank Karl Dach‐Grushow for his helpful advice and great help in improving the language of this article.