Mr. K and the Ideal Self

Abstract

The Activity Vector Analysis was administered to 19 Ss under the instructions to check first those words which they felt applied to the “perfect person,” and then those words which they perceived to be applicable to their image of Nikita Khrushchev. Two clusterings were noted: (1) the AVA stereotype of the ideal self perception, and (2) a practically unanimous profile of Mr. K. which correlated –.23 with the “perfect person” profile. The findings suggest that persons do develop as strong perceptions of concepts of others as they do of themselves and agree in their perceptions of these inferential selves. The results also reveal that, while “Mr. K.” was perceived to possess traits common to the ideal self image, the perception was, as expected on the whole, that of a substantially different personality. These results were later cross-validated with an independent sample of 27 college students.