关系自我和集体自我在自我建构中的层级关系

The Hierarchical Relationship between Relational Self and Collective Self in Self-Construale

三重自我建构认为,自我包含三个方面:个体自我,关系自我和集体自我。个体自我的核心地位已经得到诸多研究的证实,但关系自我和集体自我的层级关系还缺乏定论。越重要的自我,与积极信息的联系越紧密,以达到维持自尊、抵御自我威胁的目的。因此,采用内隐联想范式(IAT)验证对两种自我的积极联想,并对比两者积极联想程度以确定其层级关系。结果发现,相比非自我信息,被试对关系自我和集体自我均存在内隐的积极联想,从内隐的层面证实了关系自我和集体自我的存在。相比关系自我,被试对集体自我存在更强的积极联结,自我建构中的集体自我在内隐层面占据更为重要的位置。

Self, as a special psychological construction, has been studied by psychologists and sociologists for more than three decades. The selfconstrual occupies a central role in one’s life because of its relevance to ensuing cognitive, motivational, affective, and behavioral process. The model of cultural difference in self-construal claims that East Asian cultures emphasize fundamental social connection and encourage an interdependent view of a self. There is a considerable evidence that people have three cognitive representations of the self: the individual self(cognitions related to one’s particularly traits, states and behaviors), the relational self(cognitions related to relationships with close others), the collective self(representation of self as an undifferentiated and interchangeable group member). Moreover, researchers have found that people have self-advantage during the memory and cognition processing. Individuals identify the faces of their family and race faster than others, indicating that people also have self-advantage on relational-and collective-self.Under the background of Chinese traditional culture, Chinese people emphasize the collective sense of honor and belonging. The self of Chinese people is dominated by collectivism. The collectivism can be divided into two forms: relational collectivism and group collectivism. According to the cognitive representation of self, relational collectivism emphasizes the relational self, and group collectivism privileges the collective self. However, whether there is a difference between relational self and collective self under Chinese collectivism cultural is not clear yet. According to this, we employed the implicit association test(IAT) to examine the implicit positive association with the collective and relational-self. We hypothesized that:(1) Participants had implicit positive association with both relational-and collective-self.(2) Moreover, according to Chinese traditional culture, young Chinese people had larger implicit positive attitude to collective-self than to relational-self.In the present experiment, we selected mother, father, family and similar words to represent the relational-self, and words of celebrities as nonrelational-self. Chinese, the Chinese nation and similar words were selected to represent collective-self, and the words as foreigners were chosen to represent non-collective-self. Then, as the typical IAT procedure, participants completed seven tasks. There were two types of these tasks: consistent task and inconsistent task. During the consistent task, participants needed to combine the relational-/collective-self with positive valence and combine the non-self-words with negative valence. However, during the inconsistent task, participants needed to combine the relational-/collective-self with negative valence and combine the non-self-words with positive valence.The results showed that for both relational-self and collective-self, the RTs of consistent task were faster than to inconsistent task, and the accuracy of consistent task was also higher. These results indicated that people were more easily to associate the relational-/collective-self with positive attributes at the implicit level. Chinese young people had implicit positive association with relational-self and collective-self as well. Furthermore, we compared the RTs and accuracies to relational-self and collective-self. The results showed that participants reacted faster to consistent task of collective-self than to those of relational-self. Compared with relational-self, Chinese young people were more easily to associate the collective-self with positive valence, indicating that the self-construal of people in China was more inclined to group-collectivism on the implicit level.