Abstract: How people react to being the target of a threatening upward comparison may depend in part on how much they think that the person they outperformed deserved to do well. In a laboratory experiment, 53 female participants received false feedback indicating that they had outperformed a confederate on a task. During the task, the confederate followed one of three randomly assigned scripts that varied the confederate's effort to manipulate perceived deservingness: high deservingness, low deservingness, and control. Results revealed that the deservingness manipulation was successful. Results further revealed that participants were significantly more likely to downplay their performance in the high deservingness condition than in the other two conditions. Exploratory analyses revealed that state self-esteem correlated with perceived deservingness of the confederate. Results suggest that people may be especially likely to appease those they have outperformed when they believe that the outperformed deserved (but did not achieve) success. Poster attached. Thank you, Erika Koch __________________________________ Erika Koch, Ph.D. Associate Professor Department of Psychology P.O. Box 5000 St. Francis Xavier University Antigonish, Nova Scotia Canada B2G 2W5 office: Annex 108 phone: (902) 867-3950 fax: (902) 867-5189 email: ekoch@stfx.ca<mailto:ekoch@stfx.ca> web: www.stfx.ca/people/ekoch<http://www.stfx.ca/people/ekoch>