Asymmetric Self-Other Similarity Judgments Depend on Priming of Self-Knowledge (original) (raw)

Social reference points and accessibility of trait-related information in self^other similarity judgments

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1990

Two experiments examined latencies of self-other similarity judgments. The judgments were obtained for traits for which self was prototypical, other was prototypical, or neither was prototypical. Two question types used were as follows: self-as-referent questions ("How similar is X to you. .. ?") and other-as-referent questions ("How similar are you to X.. . ?*)• Judgments were faster for self-prototypical traits than for neither-prototypical traits regardless of the question form. Judgments for other-prototypical traits were faster than judgments for neither-prototypical traits in the case of the other-as-referent questions, but not in the case of self-as-referent questions. Results support the notion that both self and representations of specific others serve as habitual reference points. However, they also suggest that, compared to other social prototypes, self is a more rigid reference point, which is not easily affected by linguistic factors.

Preliminary findings on the effects of self-referring and evaluative stimuli on stimulus equivalence class formation.

Thirty-two subjects completed 2 stimulus equivalence tasks using a matching-to-sample paradigm. One task involved direct reinforcement of conditional discriminations designed to produce derived relations between self-referring stimuli (e.g., me, myself, I) and positive evaluation words (e.g., whole, desirable, perfect). The other task was designed to produce derived relations between self-referring stimuli and negative evaluation words (e.g., unworthy, flawed, inadequate). Performance on each task was recorded via response latency and percent correct. Prior to completion of the equivalence tasks, subjects completed 2 self-report measures: the Outcome Questionnaire-45 (OQ-45) and the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSE). Subjects were divided into groups based on their OQ-45 score (high or low distress) and RSE score (high or low self-esteem). Significant differences in percent correct were found between both the OQ-45 groups and the RSE groups. Subjects who reported high distress and a negative sense of self made significantly more errors on the tests for equivalence for the task that required matching self-referential stimuli with positive evaluation words.

Similarity to the Self Affects Memory for Impressions of Others in Younger and Older Adults

The Journals of Gerontology Series B: Psychological Sciences and Social Sciences, 2014

Objectives. Similarity to the self has been shown to affect memory for impressions in younger adults, suggesting a self-reference effect in person memory. Because older adults show comparable self-reference effects, but prioritize memory for positive over negative information relative to young adults, we examined age differences in self-similarity effects on memory for positive and negative impressions. Method. Younger and older adults formed positive and negative impressions of others differing in the degree of similarity to the self (high, medium, low). Results. For positive impressions, both groups showed enhanced memory for self-similar others relative to dissimilar others, whereas for negative impressions, memory was poorer for those similar to the self. When collapsed across similarity to the self, younger adults remembered negative impressions better than older adults, but interestingly, older adults exhibited a trend for better memory for the positive impressions. Discussion. Results suggest that self-reference effects in impression memory are preserved with age and that older adults exhibit positivity effects in person memory consistent with previous findings.

A Self-Reference Effect on Memory for People: We Are Particularly Good at Retrieving People Named Like Us

Frontiers in Psychology, 2016

In the present study, it was evaluated whether one's own name may produce a selfreference bias in memory for people. Results from Experiment 1 indicated that, in a verbal fluency task, participants recalled a greater number of known (familiar or famous) people with the same first name as their own than did paired participants, and vice versa. In the first experiment, paired participants knew each other but were not close. Experiment 2 examined whether this self-reference effect would still occur when the comparison target was a close other. This experiment showed that such a self-reference bias also occurred even when the paired persons were close (partners or very good friends). Overall the present paper describes a new naturalistic case of the self-reference effect.

Cognition and the self: Attempt of an independent close replication of the effects of self- construal priming on spatial memory recall

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 2017

Do different modes of thinking about the self lead to differences in performance on a contextual memory task? We conducted a pre-registered replication of the study of self-construal priming on spatial memory by Kühnen and Oyserman (2002; Study 2), simultaneously evaluating the role oftask-compliance, operationalization specificity, and cross-cultural robustness. In the original study, participants either circled first-person plural (interdependent condition) or singular pronouns (independent condition) when reading a passage and subsequently memorized and recalled a set of objects presented on a visual-spatial grid. When employing a digital version of the original procedure, we were able to replicate the original findings, with better recall of objects in their original location in the interdependent (vs. independent) condition. Notably, the effect of self-construal priming on spatial memory was strongest when screening out participants who did not comply with instructions on the pronoun task and absent when including non-compliant participants. Moreover, in contrast to the original study, effects of priming were not specific to object-&-location operationalization of spatial memory recall, and also present for location-independent object recall and object-independent spatial placement recall. Additionally, condition effects were robust across observed cultural differences: Though white participants performing less successfully compared to non-white participants, both groups were comparably susceptible to priming effects. We discuss the present results and insights learned from the replication process in light of the on-going debate about the replicability of psychological experiments, highlighting the notion of task-compliance, methodological transparency and cross-cultural factors for further advancement of psychological science.

The relations between actual similarity and experienced similarity

Journal of Research in Personality, 2014

What does it mean when one person has an experience of being similar to another, and what is the relation to actual similarity in personality? We used several indices of personality similarity and tested their relations with a perceiver's experience of similarity. Similarity in the perceiver's and target's self-ratings of personality was related to experienced similarity. However, distinctive similarity (beyond the level of similarity expected between randomly paired individuals) in personality showed negligible associations with experienced similarity. Experienced similarity was strongly related to similarity in perceiver's selfratings and their ratings of a target, and especially when that target has a personality profile that was normative or desirable. Exploratory analyses provided some indications that similarity in aspects of extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness might be particularly important to the experience of being similar. The findings thus suggest that a perceiver's experience of being similar to a target person is particularly associated with seeing the other person positively, but does not particularly indicate that one is actually much more similar to this person than chance in most circumstances unless the perceiver and target are very well-acquainted.

SOCIAL COMPARISON, SELF-CONSISTENCY, AND THE CONCEPT OF SELF

The social comparison process presents a potential source of instability in self-conception. In this study, job applicants casually encountered a stimulus person whose characteristics were either socially desirable or undesirable. Half the subjects in each of these conditions found the other was competing with them for the same position, and half did not. Preliminary assessments were also made of the subjects' level of self-consistency. The major dependent variable was self-esteem change. As predicted by comparison theory, the socially desirable stimulus person produced a significant decrease in self-esteem, while the undesirable other significantly enhanced subjects' self-estimates. Subjects low in self-consistency were most affected by the presence of the other, while extent of competition had no effect. It was also found that similarity between subject and stimulus person tended to enhance self-esteem, while dissimilarity tended to reduce it.

The automatic and the expected self: separating self- and familiarity biases effects by manipulating stimulus probability

Attention, Perception, & Psychophysics, 2014

Attentional control over prepotent responses has previously been shown by manipulating the probability with which stimuli appear. Here, we examined whether prepotent responses to self-associated stimuli can be modulated by their frequency of occurrence. Participants were instructed to associate geometric shapes with the self, their mother, or a stranger before having to judge whether the sequential shape-label pairs matched or mismatched the instruction. The probability of the different shape-label pairs was varied. There was a robust advantage to self-related stimuli in all cases. Reducing the proportion of matched self pairs did not weaken performance with self-related stimuli, whereas reducing the frequency of either matched mother or stranger pairs hurt performance, relative to when the different match trials were equiprobable. In addition, while mother and stranger pairs jointly benefitted when they both occurred frequently, there were benefits only to self pairs when the frequency of self trials increased along with either mother or stranger trials. The results suggest that biases favoring self-related stimuli occur automatically, even when self-related stimuli have a low probability of occurrence, and that expectations to frequent, selfrelated stimuli operate in a relatively exclusive manner, minimizing biases to high-probability stimuli related to other people. In contrast, biases to high-familiarity stimuli (mother pairs) can be reduced when the items occur infrequently and they do not dominate expectations over other high-frequency stimuli.