How likely people are to think of themselves in terms of a given personal characteristic is predicted from the distinctiveness postulate that the person, when confronted by a complex stimulus (such as the self), selectively notices and encodes the stimulus in terms of what is most peculiar about it, since these peculiar characteristics are the most informative in distinguishing it from other stimuli. This partial view of the person as an information-encoding machine (one is conscious of oneself insofar as, and in the ways that, one is different) is used to derive four predictions implying that ethnic identity is salient in children's spontaneous self-concepts to the extent that their ethnic group is in the minority in their social milieu at school. Our measure of salience of ethnicity was its being spontaneously mentioned by the children in response to a nondirective "Tell us about yourself" question. All four predictions were confirmed, though for several of the findings there are plausible alternative explanations.The self-concept hardly qualifies as a neglected topic in psychological research: More than a thousand studies are cited by Wylie (1974) in The Self Concept. That the yield has been somewhat disappointing relative to the input of effort derives in part from the very narrow channeling of this massive stream of work. Almost all of these studies, rather than investigating what dimensions people use in thinking about themselves, present a dimension chosen by the researcher and ask the participants to locate themselves on it. Furthermore, one dimension-self-evaluation -is so frequently selected by the researcher that this whole body of research could more aptly be designated "self-esteem" than "selfconcept." To be sure, people do include selfevaluation in their self-concepts: When children are asked to respond spontaneously to the nondirective question "Tell us about yourself," about 1% of the material elicited constitutes self-evaluation (McGuire & Pada wer-Singer, 1976); but T% ecological prevalence hardly justifies devoting over 90% of the self-concept research to the one aspect.The present study investigates a dimension of the self-concept other than self-esteem, namely, ethnicity; and it studies the extent to which ethnicity is spontaneously salient to the person (rather than investigating where one places oneself on this ethnicity dimension if the researcher raises it). Our hypotheses have been drawn from a distinctiveness postulate formulated to deal with a more general question, namely, how do people manage the problem that their senses can take in much more information than they can meaningfully deal with in perception and memory? A partial answer is that when one is confronted by a complex stimulus, one acts like

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Insofar as people organize information about and evaluations of important topics in connected and coherent systems, attitudes may be changed from within by enhancing the salience of information already present virtually within the person's belief system without communicating new information from outside sources. A cognitive positivity bias is predicted such that stimulus evaluation (e.g., self-esteem) is affected more by characteristics that the stimulus possesses than by ones it lacks. Experiment 1 tested relations between participants' momentary self-esteem and concurrently salient desirable (vs. undesirable) self-characteristics possessed (vs. lacked). Experiments 2 and 3 changed participants' self-esteem by using directed-thinking tasks to manipulate the salience of desirable (vs. undesirable) self-characteristics possessed (and, to a lesser extent, lacked).

Positive-negative asymmetry in thought can involve both cognitive asymmetry, (thinking