Priming the Individual or Collective Self

Previous research efforts have made attempts to show that priming certain cognitive personality traits can impact future behavior or responses. The present research paper will summarize the findings of some of the previous efforts, and will communicate the results of a similar priming exercise. Finally, the current results will be analyzed in order to attempt to support the assertion that priming may affect individual behavior, responses, and perceptions.

Triandis (1989) asserts that individuals possess three different aspects of the self: the private self, the public self, and the collective self. Furthermore, Triandis states that individuals will identify themselves in one of these three aspects depending on certain situational factors, such as culture, in-group/out-group status, anonymity, expectations of future interactions with others, etc.

Srull and Wyer (1979) found that causing individual participants to access certain trait characteristics by assigning them to perform cognitive tasks can affect how those individuals respond to stimuli in the future. For example, priming a participant with “hostility” or “kindness” can result in those participants’ positive or negative perceptions of an ambiguous personality that is later presented via a hypothetical vignette.

Kuhn and McPartland (1954) developed the “Twenty Statements” test. This test simply asked participants to answer the question “Who am I?” by writing twenty responses as if they were providing the answers to themselves. The responses to the questions could then be analyzed for content in order to determine whether the participants self-identified as collective (members of a group) or ideocentric (roles that were not reliant on relationships with others).

The...

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... to address some of the problems with this research study. It seems that the study may have benefited from the use of further controls. Specifically, the use of some method of capturing a baseline of self-perceptions by the participants may have provided even more illumination regarding whether the priming exercise resulted in an increase of collective or ideocentric responses.

Works Cited

Kuhn, M. H., & McPartland, T. S. (1954). An empirical investigation of self-attitudes. American Sociological Review, 19, 58-76.

Srull, T. K., & Wyer, R. S. (1979). The role of category accessibility in the interpretation of information about persons: Some determinants and implications. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 1660-1672.

Triandis, H. C. (1989). The self and social behavior in differing cultural contexts. Psychological Review, 96, 506-520.