We examined two image-maintenance processes by which people manipulate their association with others. The tendency to bask in reflected glory as a means of increasing one's association with successful others, as well as the tendency to cut off reflected failure as a means of decreasing one's association with unsuccessful others, was tested. Male and female college students were initially involved in a group task and then were assigned to one of three group performance feedback conditions: failure, no information, or success. Self-report and behavioral (taking and wearing of team badges) dependent measures of "distancing" showed that people in the failure group manifested less association with their group than did the persons in the no-information feedback and success groups; moreover, there was a tendency on behavioral but not self-report measures for persons in the success group to manifest more association with their group than for persons in the no-information feedback group. Therefore, more support was garnered for the "cutting-off-reflected-failure" process than for the "basking-in-reflected-glory" process as an image-maintenance tactic.An old adage suggests that "we are known by the company that we keep." Cialdini and his colleagues (Cialdini et al., 1976) captured one variant of this saying when they introduced a form of indirect image management known as basking in reflected glory. This phenomenon is described as the "tendency for people to publicize a connection with another person who has been successful" (Cialdini et al., 1976, p. 366), even when the connection is incidental or seemingly meaningless. Examples include people's interest in relating to observers that they were born in the same city or state as a successful public figure, or that they were on the same airplane with a famous entertainer. Other image-management "connections" involve ethnic, religious, and physical similarities to successful others (Cialdini etal., 1976). Cialdini et al. (1976) tested the existence of the basking-inreflected-glory phenomenon in a series of three studies. In a first study, using behavioral measures, Cialdini et al. found that more students demonstrated their affiliation with their university after victorious football games than they did after games in which the team was defeated. More specifically, a higher percentage of students wore clothing or buttons identifying their This article is based on a thesis by the second author under the supervision of the first author. A version of the article was presented at the American Psychological Association Convention in Los Angeles, August 1985.We thank Fritz Heider for his seminal input in the development of the cutting-off-reflected-failure concept in general, and its operationalization in this experiment. Edwin J. Martin provided valuable statistical consultation on this project. Finally, gratitude is expressed to Robert B. Cialdini, Raymond L. Higgins, and Sara Gutierres, who provided helpful suggestions on an earlier version of this article.

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One of the central hypotheses of learned helplessness theory is that exposure to noncontingency produces a reduced ability to perceive response-outcome relations (the postulated "cognitive deficit"). To test this hypothesis, subjects were exposed to a typical helplessness induction task and then asked to make judgments of the amount of control their responses exerted over a designated outcome (the onset of a light). Support for the postulated cognitive deficit would be found if subjects who experienced the induction underestimated the relation between their responses and outcomes. The results, however, demonstrated that induction subjects (n = 30) made higher and more accurate judgments of control than subjects in a no-treatment control group (n = 30). This finding clearly fails to support the postulated cognitive deficit and highlights the need for other direct tests of the basic hypotheses of helplessness theory.

The performance of poor and normal sixth-grade readers was compared on an auditory short-term memory task in two studies. In the first study, the effects of distraction, list length, and speed of stimulus presentation were investigated to test the hypothesis that the performance of the poor readers is affected by deficits in selective attention. Group differences in performance, however, were obtained for both distraction and no-distraction conditions. The second experiment examined the hypothesis that group differences may reflect differences in the use of rehearsal. In the second experiment, half the reading-disabled children and half the controls were provided with rehearsal training prior to completing the same short-term memory task a second time. Rehearsal training resulted in improved performance relative to children who were not trained; however, there was no rehearsal training X reading group interaction. The poor readers continued to show deficits in performance relative to the performance of control children. The results of these two studies suggest that deficits observed for poor readers on short-term memory tasks may reflect processing difficulties in some area that precedes rehearsal and affects performance under both distraction and no-distraction conditions.