Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

This study investigated whether actors and observers differ in their beliefs about what features of an individual best reflect his/her "authentic self " Some subjects rated the extent to which both dispositional traits (e.g., the tendency to be adventurous or not adventurous) and the specific content of the activities, thoughts, and feelings that exemplified those traits (e.g., "the things you do for adventure") reflected their "authentic selves. " Others made the same judgments about affined. Self-raters believed that the specific contents of their experiences were better indicators of their "authentic selves" than were their general dispositions, but friend-raters believed that the "authentic selves" of their acquaintances were better reflected by their general dispositions. Female subjects, both self-raters and friend-raters, tended to believe that the contents of covert emotional experiences were better indicators of the "authentic self" than male subjects did.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Allport, G. W. (1937). Personality: A psychological interpretation. New York: Holt.

Brown, R. , & Fish, D. (1983). The psychological causality implicit in language. Cognition, 14, 237-273.

Cantor, N. (1990). From thought to behavior: "Having" and "doing" in the study of personality and cognition. American Psychologist, 45, 735-750.

Fiske, S. T. , & Taylor, S. E. (1991). Social cognition (2nd ed.). New York: McGraw-Hill.

Heider, F. (1958). The psychology of interpersonal relations. New York: Wiley.

Johnson, J. T. (1987). The heart on the sleeve and the secret self: Estimations of hidden emotion in self and acquaintances. Journal of Personality, 55, 563-582.

Johnson, J. T. , Cain, L. M. , Falke, T. L. , Hayman, J. , & Perillo, E. (1985). The "Barnum effect" revisited: Cognitive and motivational factors in the acceptance of personality descriptions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49, 1378-1391.

Johnson, J. T. , Struthers, N. J. , & Bradlee, P. (1988). Social knowledge and the "secret self': The mediating effect of data base size on judgments of emotionality in the self and others. Social Cognition, 6, 319-344.

Jones, E. E. , & Nisbett, R. E. (1972). The actor and the observer: Divergent perceptions of the causes of behavior. In E. E. Jones , D. E. Kanouse , H. H. Kelley , R. E. Nisbett , S. Valins , & B. Weiner (Eds.), Attribution: Perceiving the causes of behavior (pp. 79-94). Morristown, NJ: General Learning Press.

10.

Kruglanski, A. W. (1989). Lay epistemics and human knowledge: Cognitive and motivational bases. New York: Plenum.

11.

Kruglanski, A. W. (1990). Motivations for judging and knowing: Implications for causal attribution. In E. T. Higgins & R. M. Sorrentino (Eds.), Handbook of motivation and cognition: Foundations of social behavior (Vol. 2, pp. 333-368). New York: Guilford.

12.

Markus, H. (1977). Self-schemata and processing information about the self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 35, 63-78.

13.

McGuire, W. J. (1984). Search for the self: Going beyond self-esteem and the reactive self. In R. A. Zucker , J. Arnoff , & A. I. Rubin (Eds.), Personality and the prediction of behavior (pp. 73-120). New York: Academic Press.

14.

McGuire, W. J. , & McGuire, C. V. (1986). Differences in conceptualizing self versus other people as manifested in contrasting verb types used in natural speech. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 1135-1143.

15.

Miller, D. T. , Norman, S. A. , & Wright, E. (1978). Distortion in person perception as a consequence of the need for effective control. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 36, 598-607.

16.

Monson, T. C. , Tanke, E. D. , & Lund, J. (1980). Determinants of social perception in a naturalistic setting. Journal of Research in Personality, 14, 104-120.

17.

Nisbett, R. E. , Caputo, C. , Legant, P. , & Maracek, J. (1973). Behavior as seen by the actor and as seen by the observer. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 27, 154-164.

18.

Nolen-Hoeksema, S. (1987). Sex differences in unipolar depression: Evidence and theory. Psychological Bulletin, 101, 259-282.

19.

Prentice, D. A. (1990). Familiarity and differences in self-and other-representations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 369-383.

20.

Sande, B. N. , Goethals, G. R. , & Radloff, C. E. (1988). Perceiving one's own traits and others': The multifaceted self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 13-20.

21.

Shields, S. A. (1991). Gender in the psychology of emotion: A selective research review. In K. T. Strongman (Ed.), International Review of Studies on Emotion (Vol. 1, pp. 227-245). New York: Wiley.

22.

Snyder, C. R. , & Fromkin, H. L. (1980). Uniqueness: The human pursuit of difference. New York: Plenum.

23.

Watson, D. (1982). The actor and the observer: How are their perceptions of causality divergent? Psychological Bulletin, 92, 682-700.

Dispositional Traits Versus the Content of Experience: Actor/Observer Differences in Judgments of the "Authentic Self"

Abstract

Get full access to this article

References