Temporal distance and accessibility of overt and covert trait-aspects in judgments of self and others

ABSTRACT

Results of previous studies show that, compared to other-judgments, self-judgments are characterized by higher accessibility of covert (unobservable) versus overt (observable) features. The current experiment examined trait-judgment latencies in two time-frames: recent past and distant past. In a 2x2x2 within-subject design, participants (N = 224) made self-judgments versus other-judgments, involving recent past versus distant past, and covert (e.g., feels happy) versus overt (e.g., acts happy) trait-related features. Results show that the enhanced accessibility of covert features in self-judgments is limited to the recent self and does not occur for self that is temporally distant. In contrast, for other-judgments, overt features are more accessible regardless of the time-frame. This suggests that compatibility between self-representations and other-representations increases over time.

KEYWORDS:

• Temporal distance
• vantage point
• accessibility
• self-judgments
• other-judgments

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Disclosure statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Ethics statement

All participants gave oral-informed consent in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki. The protocol was approved by the “SWPS University of Social Sciences and Humanities Departmental Ethics Committee.”

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Notes

1. In other experiments (e.g., Karylowski & Mrozinski, 2017a, 2017b) acts was used instead of looks to denote overt trait aspects, yielding comparable results.

2. To facilitate presentation, throughout the paper, mean latencies are presented after being converted back to milliseconds.

3. Note that unlike the remaining independent variables included in this analysis, response type was not experimentally controlled (no counterbalancing).

Additional information

Funding

Preparation of this paper was facilitated by the National Science Center (Poland) grant UMO-2016/21/B/HS6/03236.