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Stories are a powerful means to change recipients’ views on themselves by being transported into the story world and by identifying with story characters. Previous studies showed that recipients temporarily change in line with a story and its characters (assimilation). Conversely, assimilation might be less likely when recipients are less identified with story protagonists or less transported into a story by comparing themselves with a story character. This may lead to changes, which are opposite to a story and its characters (contrast). In two experiments, we manipulated transportation and experience taking via two written reviews (Experiment 1; N = 164) and by varying the perspective of the story’s narrator (Experiment 2; N = 79) of a short story about a negligent student. Recipients’ self-ratings in comparison to others, motives, and problem-solving behavior served as dependent variables. However, neither the review nor the perspective manipulation affected transportation or experience taking while reading the story. Against our expectations, highly transported recipients (in Study 1) and recipients with high experience taking (in Study 2) showed more persistency working on an anagram-solving task, even when controlling for trait conscientiousness. Our findings are critically discussed in light of previous research.
The aim of the book is to ground the logical origins of consciousness in what I have previously called the ‘minimal self’. The idea is that elementary forms of consciousness are logically dependent not, as is commonly assumed, on ownership of an anatomical brain or nervous system, but on the intrinsic reflexivity that defines minimal selfhood. The book seeks to trace the logical pathway by which minimal selfhood gives rise to the possible appearance of consciousness. It is argued that in specific circumstances it thus makes sense to ascribe elementary consciousness to certain predatory single-celled organisms such as amoebae and dinoflagellates as well as to some of the simpler animals. Such an argument involves establishing exactly what those specific circumstances are and determining how elementary consciousness differs in nature and scope from its more complex manifestations.
The Minimal Self
(2017)
The aim of The Minimal Self is to undertake a conceptual analysis of the term ‘self’ and thereby establish the minimal conditions that must be met to ascribe selfhood to an entity. This conceptual analysis focuses on what is termed ‘intrinsic reflexivity’, which is taken as the defining feature of selfhood. Three underlying categories of intrinsic reflexivity are distinguished: self-maintenance, self-reproduction and self-containment. These three fundamental categories provide a framework within which it is possible to distinguish entities that can be designated ‘selves’ from entities that are merely ‘self-like’, thus establishing the logical preconditions for the ‘emergence’ of selfhood. By examining the fuzzy borderlines between selves and the merely self-like as manifest in phenomena such as dissipative systems, genetic material, viruses and bacteria, it becomes possible to ascertain a form of ‘minimal selfhood’, a mode of being shared by all selves qua selves. Free-living single-celled organisms such as protozoa are paradigmatic instances of minimal selfhood to the extent that they can be characterized in terms of the three intrinsically reflexive processes of self-maintenance, self-reproduction and self-containment. Minimal selfhood is also presupposed by more complex multicellular selves such as animals. Such an analysis is found to shed light on the origin of life and on the nature of organisms and biological individuals.
The aim of the current work was to enhance the understanding of the relationship between goals and the self. More specifically, I wanted to achieve three things. First, I developed an implicit measure of self-activation (SA) based on response latencies to avoid the problems of traditional measures of self-activation (i.e., demand effects, self-presentation concerns). Therefore, two studies were conducted in which increased self-activation, induced by classic self-manipulations, was measured with a newly developed picture task. Thereby it was assumed that individuals would react faster to photographs of themselves when the self was activated than when it was not. Second, I aimed to demonstrate that there exists a close connection between personal goals and the self. Despite being inherent in several theories, this assumption has never been tested directly before. It was hypothesized that thinking about personal goals should activate the self, resulting in faster reactions in the newly developed measure of SA, i.e., quicker responses to the self-pictures. Third, it was investigated whether goals and the self are linked in a bidirectional fashion; according to the reported findings, it seems to be functional for individuals’ self-regulation and goal pursuit to develop such a link. To provide evidence for the bidirectionality of the relationship, it was hypothesized that in conditions of high SA, it should be more likely personal evaluations to be construed as goals; this goal activation should result in higher accessibility of goal-related knowledge, stronger approach motivational tendencies towards goal-related targets, and more goal-directed behavior. The obtained results endorse the applicability of the picture task as implicit method to measure increased SA and also corroborate the core hypothesis, namely that personal goals and the self are inherently connected and that they are linked in a bidirectional fashion.