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Project 7: Influences on the use of assimilation, accommodation, and immunization after expectation violation

Prof. Dr. Martin Pinquart (Developmental Psychology)

PhD Students: Larissa Henß, Chrys Gesualdo
Doctoral students: Katharina Borgolte

This sub-project will investigate conditions that promote the use of assimilation (attempts to receive future expectation-confirming information), immunization (ignoring or discounting disconfirming information) and accommodation (expectation change) after the receipt of expectation-disconfirming information. The project will consider characteristics of the expectation (e.g., perceived importance), of the discrepant information (e.g., whether the information is better or worse than expected) and of the person (e.g., dispositional tendencies to use the before mentioned three coping styles). Contents of the expectations will relate aspects of human development.

The PhD project of the third cohort (starting in October 2023) will address coping with violated achievement expectations. Many students tend to have overly optimistic expectations about their academic achievement and are, therefore, often confronted with expectation violations. The PhD project will analyze further predictors of coping with violations of achievement expectations with experimental studies and possibly a longitudinal study. The studies will analyze under which conditions achievement expectations are changed in response to expectation violations or maintained by ignoring and downplaying the importance of the validation of by actively attempting to increase the probability of future expectation confirmation.  Both aspects of the expectation violation and of the students’ personality will be considered as predictors of coping with expectation violations. 

Publications

Henß, L., & Pinquart, M. (2023). Expectations do not need to be accurate to be maintained: Valence and need for cognitive closure predict expectation update vs. persistence. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1127328.doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1127328

Gesualdo, C., & Pinquart, M. (2022). Predictors of coping with health-behavior-related expectation violations among university students. American Journal of Health Behavior, 46(4), 488-496.https://doi.org/10.5993/AJHB.46.4.9

Henß, L. & Pinquart, M. (2022). Dispositional and situational predictors of coping with violated achievement expectations. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 75(6), 1121-1134. https://doi.org/10.1177/1747021821104810

Pinquart, M., Rothers, A., Gollwitzer, M., Khosrowtaj, Z., Pietzsch, M., & Panitz, C. (2021). Predictors of coping with expectation violation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology, 25(3), 321-331. doi:10.1177/10892680211024

More information on Prof. Dr. Martin Pinquart

More information on our PhD Students