Department of Psychology, The Ohio State University.
Department of Psychology, Waterloo University.
J Exp Psychol Gen. 2019 Dec;148(12):2258-2276. doi: 10.1037/xge0000612. Epub 2019 May 16.
People experience life satisfaction when pursuing activities that genuinely interest them. Unfortunately, cultural stereotypes (e.g., "science is not for girls") and preexisting self-beliefs can bias people's memories, thereby hindering their ability to identify the domains that they actually experience as interesting. The current experiments tested a novel method for circumventing this problem by manipulating visual imagery perspective as people recalled their experiences. Four experiments measured (or manipulated) participants' actual experience of interest as they completed a task; the experiments also measured (or manipulated) participants' self-beliefs about their interest in the domain. The experiments then manipulated imagery perspective as participants recalled their interest in the task. Prior research suggests that imagery from an actor's first-person perspective facilitates a bottom-up processing style, whereas imagery from an external third-person facilitates a top-down processing style (Libby & Eibach, 2011). Consistent with this account, across all 4 experiments, first-person imagery (vs. third-person) caused people's recall to be less biased by the top-down influence of their self-beliefs and better aligned with their past experienced interest. The final experiment demonstrated downstream consequences of these effects on female undergraduates' intentions to pursue future activities in a domain (STEM) that negative stereotypes typically might dissuade them from pursuing. Thus, the present results suggest that first-person imagery can be a useful tool to reduce the influence of biased self-beliefs, while increasing sensitivity to past bottom-up experiences during recall. Further, these results hold practical implications for reducing psychological barriers that can keep underrepresented individuals from pursuing interests in counterstereotypical domains. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
当人们从事真正感兴趣的活动时，他们会体验到生活的满足感。不幸的是，文化刻板印象（例如，“科学不适合女孩”）和先入为主的自我信念可能会影响人们的记忆，从而阻碍他们识别自己真正感兴趣的领域的能力。目前的实验通过操纵人们回忆经验时的视觉意象视角，测试了一种规避这个问题的新方法。四个实验在参与者完成任务时测量（或操纵）了他们实际体验到的兴趣；这些实验还测量（或操纵）了参与者对自己在该领域兴趣的自我信念。然后，实验在参与者回忆自己对任务的兴趣时操纵了意象视角。先前的研究表明，从演员的第一人称视角产生的意象促进了自下而上的处理风格，而从外部第三人称视角产生的意象促进了自上而下的处理风格（Libby & Eibach，2011）。根据这一说法，在所有四个实验中，第一人称意象（相对于第三人称）使人们的回忆较少受到自我信念自上而下的影响，并且更符合他们过去的经验兴趣。最后一个实验证明了这些效应在女性本科生未来在一个领域（STEM）追求活动的意图上的后续影响，负面刻板印象通常可能会阻止他们追求这些活动。因此，目前的结果表明，第一人称意象可以成为一种有用的工具，减少有偏见的自我信念的影响，同时在回忆中增加对过去自下而上经验的敏感性。此外，这些结果对减少可能阻止代表性不足的个人在反刻板印象领域追求兴趣的心理障碍具有实际意义。（APA，2019 年，所有权利保留）。
