Value Judgments and the True Self

Abstract

The belief that individuals have a "true self" plays an important role in many areas of psychology as well as everyday life. The present studies demonstrate that people have a general tendency to conclude that the true self is fundamentally good--that is, that deep inside every individual, there is something motivating him or her to behave in ways that are virtuous. Study 1 finds that observers are more likely to see a person's true self reflected in behaviors they deem to be morally good than in behaviors they deem to be bad. Study 2 replicates this effect and demonstrates observers' own moral values influence what they judge to be another person's true self. Finally, Study 3 finds that this normative view of the true self is independent of the particular type of mental state (beliefs vs. feelings) that is seen as responsible for an agent's behavior.

Deep Down My Enemy is Good: Thinking About the True Self Reduces Intergroup Bias

“…We recruited 1020 participants from the United States through Amazon's Mechanical Turk, an online labor crowdsourcing platform (see Buhrmester, Kwang, & Gosling, 2011;Goodman, Cryder, & Cheema, 2013;Ipeirotis, 2010;Paolacci, Chandler, & Ipeirotis, 2010;Berinsky, Huber, & Lenz, 2012), in order to obtain a final target N = 600 (100 per condition). This sample size provides 80% power to detect an effect η p 2 = .125 (effect size is based on those observed in previous research on the true self; see Newman et al, 2014). As planned a priori, we excluded from the analysis participants who incorrectly answered an attention check at the beginning of the study, or two comprehension questions at the end of the study.…”

“…As a robustness check, we used 6 different vignettes describing different agents (e.g. opposing/supporting terrorism, respecting/mistreating minorities, being a teetotaler/alcoholic), presented between-subjects (see link to archived materials and Newman et al, 2014). These vignettes were chosen because they span a variety of moral improvements and deteriorations, and have previously been shown to elicit a reliable good true self bias across cultures (i.e., participants consistently say that moral improvements reflect the agent's true self more than moral deteriorations; De Freitas et al, 2016b).…”

“…Finally, and most relevant to the current work, it is important to emphasize that belief in a good true self is perspective-independent; people regard both their own true selves (Bench et al, 2015;Molouki & Bartels, in press) and the true selves of others (Bench et al, 2015;Newman, Bloom, & Knobe, 2014) as fundamentally good. This stands in contrast to a large body of work on the self as a whole that shows robust perspective-dependent asymmetries in a variety of domains, such as fundamental attribution error (e.g., Baumeister, Bratslavsky, Finkenauer, & Vohs, 2001;Taylor & Brown, 1994).…”

“…People often explain the behavior of individuals by appealing to the concept of a good true self (Newman, Bloom, & Knobe, 2014;Knobe, 2015). That is, when evaluating a hypothetical agent, people reason as if there is something within the agent calling him or her to behave in a manner that is morally good.…”

“…That is, when evaluating a hypothetical agent, people reason as if there is something within the agent calling him or her to behave in a manner that is morally good. For example, if the agent changes from behaving badly to behaving virtuously then participants are more likely to report that this improvement reflects the emergence of the agent's true self; conversely, if the agent changes from behaving virtuously to behaving badly, the participants report that this deterioration reflects a movement away from the agent's true self (Newman et al, 2014). Perhaps the most 1 We use the term 'bias' to refer to a response tendency, rather than to a normative departure from rationality.…”