How likely people are to think of themselves in terms of a given personal characteristic is predicted from the distinctiveness postulate that the person, when confronted by a complex stimulus (such as the self), selectively notices and encodes the stimulus in terms of what is most peculiar about it, since these peculiar characteristics are the most informative in distinguishing it from other stimuli. This partial view of the person as an information-encoding machine (one is conscious of oneself insofar as, and in the ways that, one is different) is used to derive four predictions implying that ethnic identity is salient in children's spontaneous self-concepts to the extent that their ethnic group is in the minority in their social milieu at school. Our measure of salience of ethnicity was its being spontaneously mentioned by the children in response to a nondirective "Tell us about yourself" question. All four predictions were confirmed, though for several of the findings there are plausible alternative explanations.The self-concept hardly qualifies as a neglected topic in psychological research: More than a thousand studies are cited by Wylie (1974) in The Self Concept. That the yield has been somewhat disappointing relative to the input of effort derives in part from the very narrow channeling of this massive stream of work. Almost all of these studies, rather than investigating what dimensions people use in thinking about themselves, present a dimension chosen by the researcher and ask the participants to locate themselves on it. Furthermore, one dimension-self-evaluation -is so frequently selected by the researcher that this whole body of research could more aptly be designated "self-esteem" than "selfconcept." To be sure, people do include selfevaluation in their self-concepts: When children are asked to respond spontaneously to the nondirective question "Tell us about yourself," about 1% of the material elicited constitutes self-evaluation (McGuire & Pada wer-Singer, 1976); but T% ecological prevalence hardly justifies devoting over 90% of the self-concept research to the one aspect.The present study investigates a dimension of the self-concept other than self-esteem, namely, ethnicity; and it studies the extent to which ethnicity is spontaneously salient to the person (rather than investigating where one places oneself on this ethnicity dimension if the researcher raises it). Our hypotheses have been drawn from a distinctiveness postulate formulated to deal with a more general question, namely, how do people manage the problem that their senses can take in much more information than they can meaningfully deal with in perception and memory? A partial answer is that when one is confronted by a complex stimulus, one acts like

We describe the current dissatisfactions with the paradigm that has recently guided experimental social psychology-testing of theory-derived hypotheses by means of laboratory manipulational experiments. The emerging variant of doing field experiments does not meet the criticisms. It is argued that an adequate new paradigm will be a more radical departure involving, on the creative side, deriving hypotheses from a systems theory of social and cognitive structures that takes into account multiple and bidirectional causality among social variables. On the critical side, its hypotheses testing will be done in multivariate correlational designs with naturally fluctuating variables. Some steps toward this new paradigm are described in the form of seven koan.

A discrimination theory of selective perception was used to predict that a given trait would be spontaneously salient in a person's self-concept to the exten that this trait was distinctive for the person within her or his social groups. Sixth-grade students' general and physical spontaneous self-concepts were elicited in their classroom settings. The distinctiveness within the classroom of each student's characteristics on each of a variety of dimensions was determined, and it was found that in a majority of cases the dimension was significantly more salient in the spontaneous self-concepts of those students whose characteristic on thedimension was more distinctive. Also reported are incidental findings which include a description of the contents of spontaneous self-comcepts as well as determinants of their length and of the spontaneous mention of one's sex as part of one's self-concept.

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HE present study is one of a series comparing the relative effectiveness of various pretreatments in making initially unquestioned beliefs resistant to change when subsequently the person is forced to expose himself to strong counterarguments against the belief. The theoretical point of departure of the present and the earlier studies is the postulate of "selective exposure." Initially strong appearing beliefs, it is assumed, are actually quite vulnerable under forced exposure to strong counterarguments, because such beliefs tend previously to have been overprotected. By selective avoidance of counterarguments in the past, the person has kept his beliefs extreme, but has also left himself unpracticed in their defense and unable to deal with strong counterarguments when exposure to them is forced.The postulate of "selective exposure" is no novelty in communication research. Since Klapper (1949) called it "the most basic process thus far established by research on the effects of mass media," it has stimulated much research, designed either to account for it in a theoretical system (Festinger, 1957) or to use it predictively (Janis, 1957). Its general relevance to the present problem is to suggest that beliefs can be "inoculated" against persuasion in subsequent situations involving forced exposure to strong counterarguments by pre-exposing the person to the counterarguments in a weakened form that stimulates-without overcoming-his defenses (Lumsdaine & Janis, 1953).The hypotheses tested in the study reported here were suggested by interpretations of the outcomes of two previous studies. One of them (Papageorgis & McGuire, 1961) demonstrated that prior exposure to refuted counterarguments tends to make a belief more resistant to subsequently presented strong forms, not