Reports“How much do you like your name?” An implicit measure of global self-esteem
Section snippets
The mere-ownership effect
Similar to the Name-Letter-Task (Koole et al., 2001), our new implicit measure of global self-esteem is based on the mere-ownership effect. This effect is the tendency to evaluate self-related objects more positively than self-unrelated objects. For example, people generally favor personal belongings over the belongings of others, people prefer the numbers appearing in their birth date over non-birth date numbers, and they like the letters included in their name more than other letters (Koole &
Study 1
The aim of Study 1 was to provide a preliminary test of the viability of Name-Liking as an implicit measure of global self-esteem. Therefore, we examined the correlations between Name-Liking and the only two implicit measures of self-esteem that have been shown to possess acceptable psychometric properties: the Name-Letter-Task and the Self-Esteem IAT (Bosson et al., 2000). We expected to replicate evidence that the Name-Letter-Task and the Self-Esteem IAT are unrelated (Baccus et al., 2004,
Study 2
In Study 2, we garnered additional support for the idea that Name-Liking is a measure of global rather than domain-specific self-esteem. Specifically, we tested whether Name-Liking is more strongly related to explicit measures of global self-esteem or to explicit measures of domain-specific self-esteem.
Further, we garnered additional evidence that Name-Liking is an implicit rather than explicit measure. Bosson et al. (2000) assert that “explicit self-report measures are essentially tapping
Study 3
As mentioned above, Bosson et al. (2000) found that only the Self-Esteem IAT and the evaluation of self-related objects (i.e., name letters and birth date numbers) exhibited satisfactory test–retest reliability. The first goal of Study 3 was to test if the Name-Liking measure also exhibits satisfactory test–retest reliability.
As a second goal, we tested whether Name-Liking predicts subjective well-being. Explicit measures of self-esteem are among the strongest predictors of subjective
Study 4
In Koole et al.’s (2001) third study, participants with a dispositionally fast (as opposed to slow) response style on explicit measures of self-esteem manifested a stronger relation between these measures and implicit measures of self-esteem. This finding fits dual-attitude theories of self-esteem, because implicit self-esteem is assumed to be based on faster, automatic processes, rather than slower, controlled processes (Epstein & Morling, 1995). However, this finding also fits single-attitude
Study 5
Our interpretation of Study 4 rests on the assumption that response times mainly depend on the amount of cognitive deliberation. This follows from both single-attitude and dual-attitude theories because both faking on explicit self-esteem measures (cf. single-attitude theories) and the activation of explicit self-esteem (cf. dual-attitude theories) should require cognitive capacity (e.g., Koole et al., 2001, Paulhus, 1993, Wilson et al., 2000). Nonetheless, a more direct test of our assumption
Study 6
Explicit measures of self-esteem have been shown to relate the impression management component of socially desirable responding in particular (e.g., Greenwald and Farnham, 2000, Riketta, 2004). This finding has been labeled the “Achilles’ heel” of explicit measures of self-esteem (Bosson et al., 2000). One crucial advantage of implicit measures is that they are less likely to be influenced by impression management than explicit measures (Bosson et al., 2000). In Study 6, we tested whether
General discussion
Past research and theory suggests that existing implicit measures of self-esteem assess different facets of self-esteem, rather than global self-esteem (Bosson et al., 2000, Campbell et al., 2007, Sakellaropoulo and Baldwin, 2007, Wentura et al., 2005). Thus, we aimed to develop an implicit measure that assesses global, rather than domain-specific, self-esteem.
Building on the mere-ownership effect (Koole et al., 2001), we devised an implicit measure that simply asks participants to evaluate
Acknowledgments
We thank Nicole Shelton (the action editor) and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments. Further, we thank Geoff Haddock, Tony Manstead, Constantine Sedikides, Russell Spears, Geoff Thomas, Bas Verplanken, and Ulrich von Hecker for their comments at different stages of this research. We are very thankful to John Krantz for advertising our online-studies on his web portal. We also thank Axel Sanwald for his help with programming parts of our online-studies.
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2017, Journal of Experimental Social PsychologyCitation Excerpt :The state of namelessness is considered equal to having no social identity (Watson, 1986). Even 5-month-old infants differentiate the sound of their own name from other names (Parise, Friederici, & Striano, 2010), and a preference for the letters in one's own name is regarded as an implicit measure of self-esteem (Gebauer, Riketta, Broemer, & Maio, 2008). Other autobiographical facts, such as one's date of birth, hometown, or nationality, are also crucial components of self-knowledge (Gray et al., 2004).
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