The Mental Representation of Trait and Autobiographical Knowledge About the Self

Advances in Social Cognition, Volume V

Thomas K. Srull, Robert S. Wyer, Jr.

• Publisher: Psychology Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780805813104
• eBook ISBN: 9781317717256
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: History & Theory in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

If there is one topic on which we all are experts, it is ourselves. Psychologists depend upon this expertise, as asking people questions about themselves is an important means by which they gather the data that provide much of the evidence for psychological theory. Personal recollections play an important role in clinical theorizing; people's thoughts, feelings, and beliefs provide the principal data for attitudinal research; and judgments of one's traits and descriptions of one's goals and motivations are essential for the study of personality. Yet despite their long dependence on self-report data, psychologists know very little about this basic resource and the processes that govern it. In spite of the importance of the self as a concept in psychology, virtually no empirically-tested representational models of self-knowledge can be found. Recently, however, several theoretical accounts of the representation of self-knowledge have been proposed. These models have been concerned primarily with the factors underlying a particular type of self knowledge -- our trait conceptions of ourselves. The models all share the starting assumption that the source of our knowledge of the traits that describe us is memory for our past behavior.

The lead article in this volume reviews the available models of the processes underlying trait self-descriptiveness judgments. Although these models appear quite different in their basic representational assumptions, exemplar and abstraction models sometimes are difficult to distinguish experimentally. Presenting a series of studies using several new techniques which the authors believe are effective for assessing whether people recruit specific exemplars or abstract trait summaries when making trait judgments about themselves, they conclude that specific behavioral exemplars play a far smaller role in the representation of trait knowledge than previously has been assumed. Finally, the limitations of social cognition paradigms as methods for studying the representation of long-term social knowledge are discussed, and the implications of the research for both existing and future social psychological research are explored.

1 The Mental Representation of Trait and Autobiographical Knowledge About the Self

Stanley B. Klein
Judith Loftus
University of California, Santa Barbara

If there is one topic on which we all are experts, it is ourselves. Psychologists depend on this expertise, as asking people questions about themselves is an important means by which they gather the data that provide much of the evidence for psychological theory. Personal recollections play an important role in clinical theorizing; people's thoughts, feelings, and beliefs provide the principle data for attitudinal research; judgments of one's traits and descriptions of one's goals and motivations are essential for the study of personality.

Yet despite their long dependence on self-report data, psychologists know very little about this basic resource and the processes that govern it. Consider, for instance, a judgment about one's traits, a common request in personality and social research. Most people can answer a question like "Are you cooperative?" in less than 3 seconds. But how do they do it? What determines our responses to questions about the self? How is knowledge about the self represented in memory? Sadly, psychology has little to offer in answer to these questions.

This lack of understanding is particularly striking when one considers how far psychology has come in understanding the representation and utilization of knowledge in domains other than the self. Cognitive psychologists have proposed and tested models describing the mental representation of words (e.g., Morton, 1969), sentences (e.g., J. Anderson, 1976), categories (e.g., Medin & Smith, 1984; Rosch, Mervis, Gray, Johnson, & Boyes-Braem, 1976) scripts, (e.g., Schank & Abelson, 1977), and stories (e.g., Graesser, 1981; van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983). Social psychologists have tested representational models of emotions (e.g., Clark & Fiske, 1982), attitudes (cf. Pratkanis, Breckler, & Greenwald, 1989), social stereotypes (e.g., Andersen & Klatzky, 1987), groups (e.g., Park & Hastie, 1987), and impression formation (e.g., Hamilton, 1989; Klein & Loftus, 1990a; Wyer & Srull, 1989). Yet, despite the importance of the self as a concept in psychology, virtually no empirically tested representational models of self-knowledge can be found.

Recently, however, several theoretical accounts of the representation of self-knowledge have been proposed (for recent reviews, see Higgins & Bargh, 1987; Kihlstrom et al., 1988; Klein & Kihlstrom, 1986; Wyer & Srull, 1989). These models have been concerned primarily with the factors underlying a particular type of self-knowledge—our trait conceptions of ourselves. The models all share the starting assumption that the source of our knowledge of the traits that describe us is memory for our past behavior. They disagree, however, about the role of individual behaviors in the representation of that knowledge. Specifically, some models argue that knowledge of our traits is represented at the level of individual behaviors exemplifying those traits, and that responses to questions about one's traits must be "computed" from a consideration of relevant behaviors in memory. Other models, however, argue that trait self-knowledge also can be represented in abstract form. Specifically, they propose that traits that a person considers central to his or her self-concept will be represented abstractly, and that questions regarding those traits may be answered by directly accessing the abstract representation.

The distinction separating these proposals is one that has emerged from the cognitive literature on categorization. One view holds that knowledge of a category is a summary representation abstracted from experience with multiple exemplars of that category (e.g., Homa & Chambliss, 1975; Posner & Keele, 1968; Rosch, 1975). Thus, a summary representation includes those properties that are characteristic of the category. According to this view, a determination of whether a particular object is an instance of a given category will be based on the perceived similarity of the object to the summary representation of the category in memory. For example, deciding whether a penguin is a bird will depend on the similarity of "penguin" to the summary representation of the category "bird" (i.e., whether "penguin" possesses some criterial number of properties characteristic of birds).

A second view, however, denies abstraction, and proposes instead that the mental representation of a concept consists solely of the separate representations of its known exemplars (e.g., Brooks, 1978; Hintzman, 1984, 1986, 1988; Hintzman & Ludlam, 1980; Medin & Shaeffer, 1978; Nosofsky, 1987). According to this view, the determination of whether an object is an instance of a particular concept will be based on the similarity of the object to known exemplars of the concept in memory. Thus, judging whether "penguin" is an instance of the concept "bird" will involve retrieving from memory known exemplars of birds and comparing "penguin" with them.

The issue for self-theorists concerns our knowledge of the constellation of traits that describe us, and the role of known exemplars—one's past behaviors— in the representation of that knowledge. The question is whether knowledge of one's traits is abstracted from behaviors relevant to those traits and represented in memory in summary form, or whether it consists simply of the separate representations of one's trait-relevant behaviors. Among the current models of self, however, the debate is not strictly between these opposing positions—all of the models agree that exemplars are important for judgments of at least some traits. The argument is about whether trait knowledge is represented exclusively at the level of exemplars, or whether some abstraction occurs as well.

In this chapter, we first review the available models of the processes underlying trait self-descriptiveness judgments. Although these models appear quite different in their basic representational assumptions, exemplar and abstraction models sometimes are difficult to distinguish experimentally (for a recent review, see Barsalou, 1990). We next present a series of studies using several new techniques that we believe are effective for assessing whether people recruit specific exemplars or abstract trait summaries when making trait judgments about themselves. On the basis of these studies, we conclude that specific behavioral exemplars play a far smaller role in the representation of trait knowledge than previously has been assumed. Finally, we discuss the limitations of social cognition paradigms as methods for studying the representation of long-term social knowledge, and we explore the implications of our research for both existing and future social psychological research.

Two Views of Trait Self-Descriptiveness Judgments

The Pure Exemplar View

Exemplar-based theories of the self-judgment process reflect the view that our knowledge of our traits is inseparable from specific autobiographical memories (e.g., Bellezza, 1984; Bower & Gilligan, 1979; Groninger & Groninger, 1984; Locksley & Lenauer, 1981; Matlin, 1989; Warren, Chattin, Thompson, & Tomsky, 1983). Although the details of these theories differ, they have in common the proposal that trait self-knowledge consists of the representations in memory of individual autobiographical episodes. According to this view, a judgment of whether a trait is self-descriptive is made by retrieving memories of behaviors relevant to the trait and computing the similarity of the trait to the behaviors retrieved. Thus, to decide whether one is cooperative, one would retrieve from memory behaviors relevant to cooperation and determine whether there is a match between those behaviors and "cooperative." Retrieving behaviors such as my agreement to participate in a department project, should lead me to decide that "cooperative" is self-descriptive. (Consistent with this proposal, Bower and Gilligan, 1979, noted that subjects asked to judge trait adjectives for self-descriptiveness report that they often retrieve specific autobiographical incidents to do so.)

Some of the original formulations of the pure exemplar view (e.g., Hampson, 1982a; Locksley & Lenauer, 1981) were based on an extention of Bern's (1967, 1972) theory of self-perception. Bern proposed that our knowledge of our own thoughts, feelings, and other internal states is inferred from observing our behavior and the circumstances in which it occurs. For example, a person will infer that he is hungry if he is enthusiastically eating a large meal. The idea that we infer our current internal states from currently observed behaviors suggested to some self-theorists that we also may infer our knowledge of whether a trait is self-descriptive from memories of past behaviors (see also Chaiken & Baldwin, 1981; Fazio, Effrein, & Falender, 1981; Salancik & Conway, 1975; Schlenker & Trudeau, 1990).

The Dual Exemplar/Summary View

In contrast to the pure exemplar view, a number of investigators have argued for both exemplar and summary representation of trait knowledge about the self (e.g., Bower & Gilligan, 1979; Cantor & Kihlstrom, 1987; Chew, 1983; Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984; Kihlstrom et al., 1988; Mancuso & Ceely, 1980; Markus, 1977, 1980; Wyer & Gordon, 1984; Wyer & Srull, 1986). According to this view, the self-descriptiveness of a trait can be determined either by computations performed on trait-relevant autobiographical memories, or by directly accessing summary knowledge of one's traits in memory. It is assumed that summary representations will be accessed if they exist, and that autobiographical retrieval and similarity computation will be performed only when a trait is not represented in summary form. The existence of a summary representation of a given trait is thought to imply that the trait is central to a subject's self-concept (e.g., Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984; Kihlstrom et al., 1988).

As we have noted, the models just described are primarily theoretical and have not been subjected to thorough empirical testing. In general, these models of the self have been difficult to test because the available methodologies that have been used to study the representation of exemplar and summary knowledge in other domains do not easily transfer to the study of knowledge about the self. For example, Medin, Altom, Murphy (1984) presented an elegant paradigm for assessing the contributions of exemplar and prototype information to nonsocial classification. The paradigm requires that subjects either learn category prototypes and exemplars concurrently, learn prototypes first and then exemplars, or learn exemplars only. Smith and Zarate (1990) successfully adopted the same procedure to study social judgments. The paradigm is inappropriate for studying knowledge of self, however, because self-knowledge is well-developed, and thus cannot be manipulated in the way the paradigm requires.

The paradigms typically used in research on the representation of trait knowledge about other people (i.e., person memory) are similarly inappropriate for the study of self. They explore the representation of trait knowledge about others by examining subjects' recall of a list of behaviors, each of which has been designed to exemplify a particular trait, and all of which ostensibly were performed by a "target" person. Principles governing the representation of trait knowledge about others are inferred from the effects on subjects' recall of experimental manipulations of the stimulus behaviors. Clearly, this approach would not work for studying trait knowledge about the self, as knowledge of one's own traits is developed over a lifetime, and experimental control over its acquis...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• 1. The Mental Representation of Trait and Autobiographical Knowledge About the Self
• 2. Does "Perplexing" Describe the Self-Reference Effect? Yes!
• 3. Response Times, Retrieval Strategies, and the Investigation of Autobiographical Memory
• 4. An Exemplar Model Can Explain Klein and Loftus' Results
• 5. What Does the Self Look Like?
• 6. The "Social Self" Component of Trait Knowledge About the Self
• 7. Knowledge of the Self: Is it Special?
• 8. Developing Self-Knowledge From Autobiographical Memory
• 9. Diverse Ways of Accessing Self-Knowledge: Comment on Klein and Loftus
• 10. In Defense of Behavior-Level Accessing and Use of Self-Knowledge
• 11. Self-Knowledge of an Amnesic Individual is Represented Abstractly
• 12. Exploring the Nature and Implications of Functional Independence: Do Mental Representations of the Self Become Independent of Their Bases?
• 13. Some Lingering Self-Doubts: Reply to Commentaries
• Author Index
• Subject Index