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Abstract
We examined the extent to which people high and low in helpful and honest self‐concept clarity use labeling to guide decisions about their behavior. High helpful self‐concept clarity participants in Experiment 1 who received feedback indicating they were helpful were more likely to assist a confederate who dropped some pamphlets than were those not receiving this feedback. Low helpful self‐concept clarity participants showed no change in behavior as a result of the labeling. A similar pattern was found in Experiment 2 when participants received feedback indicating they were high in honesty and then presented with an opportunity to admit they received too many credits for their participation. In a partial replication of the first experiment, high helpful self‐concept clarity participants in Experiment 3 rated themselves as more helpful after receiving the feedback, but low helpful self‐concept clarity participants did not. The pattern across all three experiments suggests people with a clear, well‐articulated self‐concept are more likely to rely on self information to guide their behavior than those low on this personality dimension. The implication for social influence researchers is that this is an individual difference characteristic that moderates susceptibility to labeling techniques.
Notes
1. We selected participants with scores in the upper and lower 40% of the distribution for the analysis. There were a number of reasons why we chose to look at extreme scores rather than the full distribution of self‐concept clarity scores. First, the distribution of scores on this scale indicated that many participants' scores fell in the center of the distribution. One reason we chose to leave them out is that previous research has indicated that moderate scorers can obscure or misrepresent actual differences between individuals scoring high and low on a scale (Sorrentino & Short, 1977). In addition, since our dependent variable was nominal, we chose to use extreme groups to increase our power to detect a significant effect. Other researchers examining phenomena using nominal data have also used this approach (see, for example, Burger & Guadagno, Citation2003; Cialdini, Trost, & Newsom, 1995).