Gastvortrag: Agency, Communion and Self-esteem

Veranstalter: Lehrstuhl für Persönlichkeitspsychologie

Gastvortrag von

Prof. Dr. Bogdan Wojciszke
Warsaw University of Social Science and Humanities

„Agency, Communion and Self-esteem”
Agency and communion are widely believed to constitute two basic content dimensions of social cognition. Much of previous research showed that interpersonal perceptions and evaluations are dominated by communion over agency, presumably because communion reflects the perceiver’s interests as a recipient of others’ actions and is directly relevant for locating others on the approach-avoidance dimension. Based on the same logic, we propose that self-perceptions and self-evaluations (i.e. selfesteem) are dominated by agency over communion, because agency reflects the perceiver’s interest as an action agent. We report a series of studies showing that: (1) spontaneous self-descriptions are more saturated with agentic than communal content; (2) self-ascribed agency is a stronger predictor of self-esteem than self-ascribed communion and this effect is independent of age, gender, and (individualistic vs. collectivistic) culture; (3) agentic memories (of success vs. failure) influence current selfesteem to higher extent than communal memories (of norm maintenance vs. transgression acts); (4) spontaneous self-affirmation refers more strongly to agentic than communal virtues. We conclude with speculations that usually people refrain from actual self-judgments in the communal domain and present instead a priori pseudoevaluations of their morality as overwhelmingly positive.

Ort: M3N/R 02.32
Zeit: Dienstag, 27.11.2012 16.15 Uhr

Kontakt:

Schütz, Astrid Lehrstuhl für Persönlichkeitspsychologie und Psychologische Diagnostik Telefon 0951/8631870, Fax 0951/8634870, E-Mail: astrid.schuetz@uni-bamberg.de

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