Standards and Expectancies: Contrast and Assimilation in Judgments of Self and Others (Essays in Social Psychology)

began working on this book by accident. Sometime around 1998, I was asked by Abe Tesser and Norbert Schwarz to contribute a chapter to their volume Intraindividual Processes, which was to be part of the Blackwell Handbook of Social Psychology (2001). The assigned topic was standards, expectancies, and social comparison, and I dutifully produced a chapter with the help of my then graduate student, Laura Billings. However, I went a bit overboard and ended up with a document four times as long as the editors had requested. The problem was that I kept discovering interesting research and theory that was disparate in focus but still connected to the theme of standards, expectancies, and judgment. It was Norbert Schwarz who first made me edit the chapter drastically and then encouraged me to consider revisiting the original manuscript and turning it into a monograph for publication in the Psychology Press Essays in Social Psychology series. I am extremely grateful to Norbert for that encouragement and for his comments on the book prospectus, and to series editors Mahzarin Banaji and Miles Hewstone for their support of the project.