Good Me Bad Me: Prioritization of the Good-Self During Perceptual Decision-Making

Abstract

People display systematic priorities to self-related stimuli. As the self is not a unified entity, however, it remains unclear which aspects of the self are crucial to producing this stimulus prioritization. To explore this issue, we manipulated the valence of the self-concept (good me vs. bad me) -a core identity-based facet of the self -using a standard shape-label association task in which participants initially learned the associations (e.g., circle/good-self, triangle/good-other, diamond/bad-self, square/bad-other), after which they completed shape-label matching and shape-categorization tasks, such that attention was directed to different aspects of the stimuli (i.e., self-relevance and valence). The results revealed that responses were more efficient to the good-self shape (vs. other shapes), regardless of the task that was undertaken. A hierarchical drift diffusion model (HDDM) analysis indicated that this good-self prioritization effect was underpinned by differences in the rate of information uptake. These findings demonstrate that activation of the good-self representation exclusively facilitates perceptual decision-making, thereby furthering understanding of the self-prioritization effect.

Self-Positivity or Self-Negativity as a Function of the Medial Prefrontal Cortex

“…In both tasks, items ‘tagged’ with important social information (self, positive, and negative emotions) gained processing priority. These results are in line with previous behavioural studies that reported a consistent advantage for self-related stimuli (compared to stranger-associations) [ 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 ] and emotionally valenced stimuli (compared to neutral emotional expression) [ 36 , 37 , 57 ]. An interesting finding in the present study is that the magnitude of positive but not negative emotion biases could predict the magnitude of the self-prioritisation effect.…”

“…Our experimental design stems from an associative matching procedure in which a basic stimulus (e.g., simple geometric shapes) is associatively tagged to personally significant information (e.g., ‘self’, ‘friend’, or ‘stranger’) or emotionally valenced information (e.g., ‘happy’, ‘sad’, or ’neutral’). Previous studies using this paradigm demonstrated that immediately after these associations are formed, participants favour the shapes associated with self [ 29 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 , 34 , 35 ] and emotional information [ 36 , 37 ]. These findings provide evidence that perceptual judgments can be enhanced by tagging external stimuli (i.e., shapes) with an internal self-concept or emotion representations (i.e., referred to by personal labels or emotional cues).…”

The Self-Prioritization Effect: Self-referential processing in movement highlights modulation at multiple stages

“…They then carry out a matching task in which they have to judge whether sequentially presented shape–label pairs match the designated associations or not. Greater accuracy and shorter RTs are robustly found in the self-associated shape–label matching condition (Golubickis et al, 2017 ; Hu et al, 2020 ; Humphreys & Sui, 2016 ; Woźniak & Knoblich, 2019 ).…”

Social group membership and an incidental ingroup-memory advantage

“…Future studies may examine if and the extent to which this self-to-ingroup generalisation of self-positivity contributes to the incidental ingroup-memory advantage. In this regard, it is worth noting that recent studies have shown that the self-prioritisation effect in perceptual processing is mainly driven by association between the stimuli and positive aspects of the self (i.e., the “good” self) rather than negative aspects of the self (i.e., the “bad” self) (Hu et al, 2020) and that the experience of negative mood reduces the magnitude of the self-prioritisation effect (Sui et al, 2016).…”