Consistent Belief in a Good True Self in Misanthropes and Three Interdependent Cultures

Abstract

People sometimes explain behavior by appealing to an essentialist concept of the self, often referred to as the true self. Existing studies suggest that people tend to believe that the true self is morally virtuous, i.e., that, deep inside, every person is motivated to behave in morally good ways. Is this belief particular to individuals with optimistic beliefs or people from Western cultures, or does it reflect a widely held cognitive bias in how people understand the self? To address this question, we tested the good true self theory against two potential boundary conditions that are known to elicit different beliefs about the self as a whole. Study 1 tested whether individual differences in misanthropy -the tendency to view humans negatively -predict beliefs about the good true self in an American sample. The results indicate a consistent belief in a good true self, even among individuals who have an explicitly pessimistic view of others. Study 2 compared true self-attributions across cultural groups, by comparing samples from an independent country (USA) and a diverse set of interdependent countries (Russia, Singapore, and Colombia). Results indicated that the direction and magnitude of the effect are comparable across all groups we tested. The belief in a good true self appears robust across groups varying in cultural orientation or misanthropy, suggesting a consistent psychological tendency to view the true self as morally good.

Deep Down My Enemy is Good: Thinking About the True Self Reduces Intergroup Bias

“…[Name] is different from you in almost every way-he has a different occupation and prefers different things than you." This introduction is typically used in studies of the true self (De Freitas et al, 2016b;Newman, Bloom, & Knobe, 2014) in order to minimize the effect of perceived similarity between the participant and agent on more arbitrary factors (e.g. same job, lifestyle), since people tend to like those who are similar to them on just about any dimension (Ross, Greene, & House, 1977).…”

Origins of the Belief in Good True Selves

“…Despite such established differences in selfjudgments, belief in a good-true-self was documented both in the U.S. and three markedly different interdependent cultural groups-Colombia, Russia, and Singapore. For all three groups, people were more likely to say that the true self caused a change towards moral behavior than neurtral or immoral behavior, even though each group varied socio-economically and made substantially more interdependent self-characterizations than the U.S. [5].…”

“…Beliefs about morally good-true-selves exhibit this property: Changes in moral characteristics are more disruptive to identity judgments than changes in other personality characteristics or morally 4 neutral or immoral characteristics [4][5]. For example, if a person is described to have undergone a transplant, people are more likely to say that the person is no longer the same person if the transplant leads to a change in their moral characteristics compared to their emotions, autobiographical memories, or lower-level cognitive traits [4].…”

“…For example, if a person is described to have undergone a transplant, people are more likely to say that the person is no longer the same person if the transplant leads to a change in their moral characteristics compared to their emotions, autobiographical memories, or lower-level cognitive traits [4]. Similarly, people are more likely to attribute change from immoral to moral behavior (e.g., deadbeat dad to involved dad) to the emergence of the person's true self, compared to analogous changes from moral to immoral behavior or morally neutral changes in preferences (e.g., a change in one's favorite sport) [5].…”

“…Belief in a good-true-self has (i) been observed in independent and several interdependent cultures that vary in affluence, (ii) applies equally to both in-group and out-group members, and (iii) is evident even among misanthropes [5]. In all these studies, people either explicitly or implicitly endorsed the notion that morally good characteristics comprise the self-essence, whereas immoral characteristics do not.…”