关键词: 三重自我建构, 关系自我, 集体自我, IAT, 内隐积极联想

Abstract: Self, as a special psychological construction, had been researched by psychologist and sociologist more than three decades. The self-construal occupies a central role in one’s life because of its relevance to ensuing cognitive, motivational, affective, and behavioral process. The model of cultural difference in self-construal claims that East Asian cultures emphasize fundamental social connection and encourage an interdependent view of a self. There is a considerable evidence that people have three cognitive representations of the self: the individual self (cognitions related to one’s particularly traits, states and behaviors), the relational self (cognitions related to relationships with close others), the collective self (representation of self as an undifferentiated and interchangeable group member). Moreover, researchers found that people had self-advantage during the memory and cognition processing. Individuals identified the faces of their family and race faster than others, indicating people also have self-advantage on relational- and collective-self. Under the background of Chinese traditional culture, Chinese people emphasize the collective sense of honor and belonging. The self of Chinese people is dominated by collectivism. The collectivism can be divided into two forms: relational collectivism and group collectivism. According to the cognitive representation of self, relational collectivism emphasizes the relational self and group collectivism privileges the collective self. However, whether there is a difference between relational self and collective self under Chinese collectivism cultural is not clear yet? According this, we explored the implicit association test (IAT) to examine to implicit positive association with the collective and relational-self. We hypothesis: (1) participants had implicit positive association with both relational- and collective-self. (2) Moreover, according to Chinese traditional culture, young Chinese people have larger implicit positive attitude to collective-self than to relational-self. In the present experiment, we selected mother, father, family and similar words to represent the relational-self, and words of celebrities as non-relational-self. Chinese, the Chinese nation and similar words were selected to represent collective-self, and the words like foreigners were choose to represent non-collective-self. Then, as the typical IAT procedure, participants completed seven tasks. And there were two types of these tasks: consistent task and inconsistent task. During the consistent task, participants needed to combine the relational-/collective-self with positive valence, and combine the non-self-words with negative valence. However, during the inconsistent task, participants needed to combine the relational-/collective-self with negative valence, and combine the non-self-words with positive valence. The results showed that both relational-self and collective-self, the RTs to consistent task were faster than to inconsistent task, and the accuracy of consistent task was also higher. These results indicating that people will be more easily to associate the relational-/collective-self with positive attributes in the implicit level. Chinese young people have implicit positive association with relational-self and collective-self as well. Furthermore, we compared the RTs and accuracies to relational-self and collective-self. The results showed that participants reacted faster to consistent task of collective-self than relational-self. Compared with relational-self, Chinese young people will be more easily to associate the collective-self with positive valence, indicating that the self-construal of people in China is more inclined to group-collectivism on the implicit level.

Key words: the tripartite model of self-construal, relational self, collective self , IAT, implicit positive association