Prototype Distancing: A Strategy for Choosing among Threatening Situations

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Abstract
Previous analyses have provided consistent evidence that people prefer to enter social situations associated with person-in-situation prototypes that are most similar to their self-concepts (a process called prototype matching). The present work extends this analysis by considering a strategy for choosing among situations that pose a threat to positive self-evaluation. Indivi-duals' preferences for different types of psychotherapists were examined. Results suggest that subjects used a prototype-distancing strategy that involved maximizing dissimilarity between self-concept and patient prototypes when similarity was defined in terms of typical emotional experiences (but not when similarity was defined in terms of characteristic personality traits). In addition, consistent with the notion that threats to self-evaluation arouse self-enhancement motives, results also indicate a greater role of the ideal self than the actual self in the choice strategy.

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