Thinking about Change in the Self and Others: The Role of Self-Discovery Metaphors and the True Self

Bench, Shane W.; Schlegel, Rebecca J.; Davis, William E.; Vess, Matthew

doi:10.1521/soco.2015.33.3.2

Cited by 39 publications

(32 citation statements)

References 43 publications

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“…One consistent finding from this research is that people tend to attribute to the true self the traits that they themselves regard as good (Bench, Schlegel, Davis, & Vess, 2015;Haslam, Bastian, & Bissett, 2004;Molouki & Bartels, in press;Newman, Bloom, et al, 2014). More specifically, a host of studies suggest that people are especially inclined to equate an agent's true self with those aspects of the agent they regard as morally good (Bench et al, 2015;A.…”

Section: The Good True Selfsupporting

confidence: 60%

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

et al. 2017

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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.

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Section: The Good True Selfsupporting

confidence: 60%

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

et al. 2017

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“…For example, although Mark's erotic feelings appear to be ego-dystonic (unlike his religiously motivated beliefs), 2 this fact does not prevent people with positive moral attitudes towards homosexuality from seeing his same-sex encounters as essencedisclosing. The folk concept of the true self allows that we can be mistaken in what we reflectively endorse: our true selves are something we must discover (Bench, Schlegel, Davis, & Vess, 2015). Thus, analyzing the person/situation distinction in terms of reflective endorsement appears to treat as constitutive what is really heuristic.…”

Section: The Ego-syntonic/ego-dystonic Distinctionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When do circumstances excuse? Moral prejudices and beliefs about the true self drive preferences for agency-minimizing explanations

Cullen

2018

Cognition

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A B S T R A C TWhen explaining human actions, people usually focus on a small subset of potential causes. What leads us to prefer certain explanations for valenced actions over others? The present studies indicate that our moral attitudes often predict our explanatory preferences far better than our beliefs about how causally sensitive actions are to features of the actor's environment. Study 1 found that high-prejudice participants were much more likely to endorse nonagential explanations of an erotic same-sex encounter, such as that one of the men endured a stressful event earlier that day. Study 2 manipulated participants' beliefs about how the agent's behavior depended on features of his environment, finding that such beliefs played no clear role in modeling participants' explanatory preferences. This result emerged both with low-and high-prejudice, US and Indian participants, suggesting that these findings probably reflect a species-typical feature of human psychology. Study 3 found that moral attitudes also predicted explanations for a woman's decision to abort her pregnancy (3a) and a person's decision to convert to Islam (3b). Study 4 found that luck in an action's etiology tends to undermine perceptions of blame more readily than perceptions of praise. Finally, Study 5 found that when explaining support for a rival ideology, both Liberals and Conservatives downplay agential causes while emphasizing environmental ones. Taken together, these studies indicate that our explanatory preferences often reflect a powerful tendency to represent agents as possessing virtuous true selves. Consequently, situation-focused explanations often appear salient because people resist attributing negatively valenced actions to the true self. There is a person/situation distinction, but it is normative.

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“…Finally, and most relevant to the current work, it is important to emphasize that belief in a good true self is perspective-independent; people regard both their own true selves (Bench et al, 2015;Molouki & Bartels, in press) and the true selves of others (Bench et al, 2015;Newman, Bloom, & Knobe, 2014) as fundamentally good. This stands in contrast to a large body of work on the self as a whole that shows robust perspective-dependent asymmetries in a variety of domains, such as fundamental attribution error (e.g., Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001;Taylor & Brown, 1994).…”

Section: The Good True Selfmentioning

confidence: 96%

Deep down my enemy is good: Thinking about the true self reduces intergroup bias

Freitas

Cikara

2018

Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

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TRUE SELF & INTERGROUP BIAS 2Intergroup bias -preference for one's in-group relative to out-groups -is one of the most robust phenomena in all of psychology. Here we investigate whether a positive bias that operates at the individual-level, belief in a good true self, may be leveraged to reduce intergroup bias. We find that even stereotypically threatening out-group agents are believed to have a good true self (Experiment 1). More importantly, consideration of in-group and outgroup members' true self reduces intergroup bias, both in the form of explicit evaluative judgments (Experiment 2) and actual donation behavior (Experiment 3). Across studies, the palliative effects of thinking of an individual's true self generalize to that individual's entire group. In sum, a simple intervention -thinking about another's true self -reduces the gap in how people evaluate and treat out-group relative to in-group members. We discuss implications of these findings for conflict reduction strategies.

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Thinking about Change in the Self and Others: The Role of Self-Discovery Metaphors and the True Self

Cited by 39 publications

References 43 publications

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

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

When do circumstances excuse? Moral prejudices and beliefs about the true self drive preferences for agency-minimizing explanations

Deep down my enemy is good: Thinking about the true self reduces intergroup bias

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