Implicit egotism is the

hypothesis A hypothesis (plural hypotheses) is a proposed explanation for a phenomenon. For a hypothesis to be a scientific hypothesis, the scientific method requires that one can test it. Scientists generally base scientific hypotheses on previous obse ...

that humans have an

unconscious Unconscious may refer to: Physiology * Unconsciousness, the lack of consciousness or responsiveness to people and other environmental stimuli Psychology * Unconscious mind, the mind operating well outside the attention of the conscious mind a ...

preference for things they associate with themselves. In a 2002 paper,

psychologists A psychologist is a professional who practices psychology and studies mental states, perceptual, cognitive, emotional, and social processes and behavior. Their work often involves the experimentation, observation, and interpretation of how indi ...

Pelham, Mirenberg, and Jones argue that people have a basic desire to feel good about themselves and behave according to that desire. These automatic positive associations would influence feelings about almost anything associated with the

self The self is an individual as the object of that individual’s own reflective consciousness. Since the ''self'' is a reference by a subject to the same subject, this reference is necessarily subjective. The sense of having a self—or ''selfhood ...

. Based on the

mere ownership effect The mere ownership effect is the observation that people who own a good tend to evaluate it more positively than people who do not. It is typically demonstrated in a paradigm in which some participants in an experiment are randomly assigned to own ...

, which states that people like things more if they own them, and the name-letter effect, which states that people like the letters of their name more than other letters, the authors theorised that people would develop an affection for objects and concepts that are chronically associated with the self, such as their name. They called this putative form of unconscious attraction 'implicit egotism'. Uri Simonsohn subsequently suggested that implicit egotism only applies to cases where people are nearly indifferent between options, and therefore it would not apply to major decisions such as career choices. Low-stakes decisions such as choosing a charity would show an effect. Raymond Smeets theorised that if implicit egotism stems from a positive evaluation of the self, then people with low self-esteem would not gravitate towards choices associated with the self, but possibly away from them (a laboratory experiment was cited in support of this hypothesis). Implicit egotism is used by some researchers as an explanation for putative psychological effects such as

nominative determinism Nominative determinism is the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate towards areas of work that fit their names. The term was first used in the magazine ''New Scientist'' in 1994, after the magazine's humorous "Feedback" column noted several ...

– the hypothesis that people tend to gravitate towards areas of work that fit their names (e.g. the notion that

Igor Judge Igor Judge, Baron Judge, (born 19 May 1941) is an English former judge who served as the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, the head of the judiciary, from 2008 to 2013. He was previously President of the Queen's Bench Division, at the ...

became a judge because of his name). In a paper published in 2011, reporting a reanalysis of data from previous population studies, Simonsohn concluded that despite the existence of apparent correlations "all heexisting evidence appears to be spurious." He criticized Pelham and his colleagues for not considering

confounding factor In statistics, a confounder (also confounding variable, confounding factor, extraneous determinant or lurking variable) is a variable that influences both the dependent variable and independent variable, causing a spurious association. Con ...

s in their data analyses, and pointed out that reverse causality could also help explain several of the correlations. In response, Pelham and Carvallo published a new study in 2015, in which they controlled for gender, ethnicity, and education levels. In one study looking at both U.S. and English census data they found evidence of people disproportionately working in eleven occupations whose titles matched their surnames (namely, baker, barber, butcher, butler, carpenter, farmer, foreman, mason, miner, painter, and porter). This study also suggested that people may be disproportionately likely to marry others who share either their birthday numbers or their birth months. Pelham and Carvallo argued that "natural experiments" such as this may attenuate confounders that were potentially applicable to past studies of implicit egotism. They suggest that a tendency to develop strong preferences for things that resemble the self may be explained by psychological processes such as

mere exposure The mere-exposure effect is a psychological phenomenon by which people tend to develop a preference for things merely because they are familiar with them. In social psychology, this effect is sometimes called the familiarity principle. The effect ...

and

classical conditioning Classical conditioning (also known as Pavlovian or respondent conditioning) is a behavioral procedure in which a biologically potent stimulus (e.g. food) is paired with a previously neutral stimulus (e.g. a triangle). It also refers to the learni ...

Notes

References

* * * * * {{cite book, last=Smeets, first=Raymond, title=On the Preference for Self-related Entities:The Role of Positive Self-associations in Implicit Egotism Effects, location=Nijmegen, the Netherlands, publisher=UB Nijmegen, year=2009, isbn=978-90-90-24290-3 Social psychology

See also

Notes

References