Garcia-Arch Josue, Sabio-Albert Marc, Korn Christoph W, Fuentemilla Lluis
Department of Cognition, Development and Education Psychology, University of Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain.
Institute of Neuroscience, Barcelona, Spain.
R Soc Open Sci. 2025 Sep 24;12(9):250590. doi: 10.1098/rsos.250590. eCollection 2025 Sep.
Learning about the social expectations tied to upcoming social roles is crucial to promoting adaptation. However, such learning can prompt a strong need for personal change, undermining the stability of individuals' self-concept. Here, we provide a mechanistic account of how individuals at the onset of significant life transitions utilize their self-concept to modulate self-role dissonances during social role learning. Participants engaged in a learning task where they first provided self-ratings for different traits and then estimated how these traits would apply to an individual well-adapted to their forthcoming social role and received trial-by-trial feedback from reference groups. We hypothesized that individuals would employ strategies to minimize dissonances between role expectations and their current self-concept during the learning process. Our computational models included strategies that straightforwardly integrate role expectations to more complex strategies that involve leveraging the self-concept against the pure incorporation of role-related information. The best-performing model demonstrated that the self-concept functions as a modulatory mechanism, guiding the integration of role information to avoid self-role dissonances. Notably, this strategy was strongly accentuated in individuals learning about their upcoming contexts. Our work offers a mechanistic perspective on role learning that may inform interventions to support those facing significant life transitions.
了解与即将到来的社会角色相关的社会期望对于促进适应至关重要。然而，这种学习可能会引发对个人改变的强烈需求，从而破坏个体自我概念的稳定性。在此，我们提供了一种机制性解释，说明处于重大生活转变初期的个体如何在社会角色学习过程中利用其自我概念来调节自我与角色的不一致。参与者参与了一项学习任务，他们首先对不同特质进行自我评分，然后估计这些特质如何适用于一个很好地适应其即将到来的社会角色的个体，并从参照群体那里获得逐次试验的反馈。我们假设个体在学习过程中会采用策略来最小化角色期望与其当前自我概念之间的不一致。我们的计算模型包括直接整合角色期望的策略，以及涉及利用自我概念来反对单纯纳入与角色相关信息的更复杂策略。表现最佳的模型表明，自我概念起到一种调节机制的作用，指导角色信息的整合以避免自我与角色的不一致。值得注意的是，这种策略在学习即将到来的情境的个体中表现得更为突出。我们的工作为角色学习提供了一种机制性视角，这可能为支持那些面临重大生活转变的人的干预措施提供参考。
