Zinn Anna Kristina, Lavric Aureliu, Naserianhanzaei Elahe, Koschate Miriam
Department of Psychology, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK.
UQ Business School, The University of Queensland, Brisbane, Queensland, Australia.
Br J Soc Psychol. 2025 Jul;64(3):e12906. doi: 10.1111/bjso.12906.
Understanding potential costs of social identity switching contributes to our knowledge of how people manage their various group memberships in a fast-paced and interconnected world. Recent research demonstrates that people can switch between demographic social identities seamlessly. The current studies advance this research by (1) moving beyond demographic identities to identities that are not perceptually distinguishable, (2) developing a new identity switching paradigm based on an implicit computational linguistic style measure of salience and (3) including self-report measures of salience, task difficulty and performance. In two within-subjects studies (N = 211; N = 220), a short writing task was used to prompt a switch from participants' parent identity to their feminist identity or a repetition of the feminist identity. Findings from the implicit measure revealed no identity activation 'cost' in the switch relative to the repeat condition, consistent with previous findings for demographic identities. In contrast, we found evidence for lower self-reported salience of the feminist identity in the switch compared to the repeat condition. Furthermore, Study 2 found little difference in self-rated performance or task difficulty between conditions, indicating that switching identities does not affect self-rated performance. The results illustrate a new paradigm for investigating social identity switching.
了解社会身份转换的潜在成本有助于我们了解在一个快节奏且相互关联的世界中，人们是如何管理自己的各种群体成员身份的。最近的研究表明，人们可以在不同的人口统计学社会身份之间无缝切换。当前的研究通过以下方式推进了这项研究：（1）从人口统计学身份扩展到在认知上难以区分的身份；（2）基于一种关于显著性的隐式计算语言风格测量方法，开发了一种新的身份转换范式；（3）纳入了关于显著性、任务难度和表现的自我报告测量方法。在两项被试内研究中（N = 211；N = 220），一项简短的写作任务被用于促使参与者从其父母身份转换为女权主义者身份，或者重复女权主义者身份。来自隐式测量的结果显示，与重复条件相比，身份转换中不存在身份激活“成本”，这与之前关于人口统计学身份的研究结果一致。相比之下，我们发现有证据表明，与重复条件相比，转换过程中女权主义者身份的自我报告显著性较低。此外，研究2发现不同条件下自我评定的表现或任务难度几乎没有差异，这表明身份转换不会影响自我评定的表现。研究结果展示了一种研究社会身份转换的新范式。
