Department of Psychological & Brain Sciences, Texas A&M University.
Department of Psychology, New York University.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2019 Aug;117(2):386-416. doi: 10.1037/pspp0000254.
Why do many people come to believe that they and others have a true self? We hypothesized that this belief emerges because people routinely rely on essentialist reasoning to understand personal identity and the self. Across eight studies, we found that (a) the features that participants attributed to the true self resembled the features typically attributed to essences (e.g., immutability, informativeness, inherence; Studies 1-4); (b) endorsement of belief in true selves correlated with endorsement of other essentialist beliefs (Study 5); and (c) experimental manipulations of essentialist beliefs in domains other than the self spilled over and affected participants' endorsement of belief in true selves (Studies 6-8). These findings advance theory on the origins and functions of beliefs about the true self, suggesting that these beliefs are, in part, a specific downstream consequence of the broader tendency to explain phenomena in the world in terms of underlying essences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
为什么许多人开始相信自己和他人拥有真实的自我？我们假设这种信念的产生是因为人们通常依靠本质主义推理来理解个人身份和自我。在八项研究中，我们发现：（a）参与者归因于真实自我的特征与通常归因于本质的特征相似（例如，不变性、信息性、内在性；研究 1-4）；（b）对真实自我的信念的认可与对其他本质主义信念的认可相关（研究 5）；（c）对自我以外领域的本质主义信念的实验性操纵会溢出并影响参与者对真实自我的信念的认可（研究 6-8）。这些发现推进了关于真实自我信念的起源和功能的理论，表明这些信念部分是更广泛地用潜在本质来解释世界现象的趋势的特定下游后果。（PsycINFO 数据库记录（c）2019 APA，保留所有权利）。
