Self-Monitoring and attitude accessibilit自我监测和无障碍态度

U NIVERSITÉ DE L AUSANNEÉCOLE DES H AUTES ÉTUDES C OMMERCIALESSELF-MONITORING AND ATTITUDEACCESSIBILITYSelf-monitoring and Attitude Accessibility Revisited1Sandor CzellarDecember 2003Institut Universitaire de Management International (IUMI)École des HECUniversité de LausanneCH – 1015 Lausanne / SwitzerlandTél: ++41 (0)21 692 3310, Fax: ++41 (0)21 692 3495Admin.mim@hec.unil.ch / www.hec.unil.ch/iumi1 Results from this paper are presented at the Society for Consumer Psychology Conference, San Francisco, February 2004.AbstractResearch on self-monitoring and attitude accessibility has remained inconclusive about two alternative hypotheses. In a pioneering study, Kardes, Sanbonma tsu, Voss and Fazio (1986) reported shorter response latencies for low self-monitors than for high self-monitors in implicit cognition tasks. A first explanation of this result is that low self-monitors could have more accessible attitudes than high self-monitors. An alternative explanation is that the attitudes of both low- and high self-monitors may be equally accessible, but that – out of a concern for self-presentation - high self-monitors deliberate more in certain attitude response tasks, even if these are implicit in the form of response latencies. Our empirical results based on implicit association tests support the latter hypothesis rather than the former. We interpret past research in light of this evidence and discuss its implications for future inquiry in consumer psychology.Self-monitoring and Attitude Accessibility RevisitedAccording to self-monitoring theory, “individuals differ in the extent to which they monitor (observe and control) their expressive behavior and self-presentation” (Snyder, 1974, p. 536). Low self-monitors tend to exert relatively little control over their expressive behavior. They project towards others a stable self in diverse settings of social interaction and their behavior is guided predominantly by inner beliefs and attitudes rather than social influences. In contrast, high self-monitors exert more expressive control over their social behavior and tend to adapt their appearance and acts to specific situations. During the last three decades, a substantial body of research has been accumulated on self-monitoring in social psychology in general (Gangestad & Snyder, 2000) and in consumer psychology in particular (DeBono, 1987; DeBono, 2000; DeBono & Harnish, 1988; Shavitt, Lowrey & Han, 1992; Snyder & DeBono, 1985).Among numerous other findings, research shows that low self-monitors form judgments and intentions and display behavior that are more consistent with their attitudes than high self-monitors (Ajzen, Timko & White, 1982; DeBono & Omoto, 1993; Kraus, 1995). This observation about the rather high attitude-behavior consistency of low self-monitors has led several scholars to investigate the relation between self-monitoring and attitude accessibility (DeBono, Green, Shair & Benson, 1995; DeBono & Snyder, 1995; Kardes, Sanbonmatsu, Voss & Fazio, 1986; Mellema & Bassili, 1995). Empirical research on this topic remains nevertheless mixed and inconclusive, leaving up two alternative hypotheses and mixed evidence. A first hypothesis, proposed by Kardes et al. (1986), is that low self-monitors may have higher attitude accessibility than high self-monitors, leading to shorter response latencies in attitude response tasks. This statement seems to be backed by empirical evidence reported by Kardes et al. (1986), who show that response latencies to “good” vs. “bad” evaluations of 125 diverse attitude objectswere faster for low- than for high self-monitors. DeBono and Snyder (1995) have reported similar supportive results in two experiments.An alternative explanation for this evidence, first proposed by Kardes et al. (1986) themselves, is that differences in response latencies of low self-monitors may have no link to attitude accessibility. Rather, the attitudes of both low- and high self-monitors may be equally accessible, but that – out of a concern for self-presentation - high self-monitors deliberate more in attitude response tasks, even if these are implicit in form of response latencies. Differences in response latencies could therefore be attributable to conscious deliberation rather than higher attitude accessibility. To complicate matters further, two other studies (DeBono et al., 1995; Mellema & Bassili, 1995) reported no difference in attitude task response latencies between low- and high self-monitors. These results do not support either of Kardes et al.'s (1986) hypotheses.In general, high self-monitors are more concerned about self-presentation than low self-monitors (Gangestad & Snyder, 2000). Therefore, if there is motivation and opportunity to deliberate in a given evaluation task, then high self-monitors would do more so than low self-monitors. Our suspicion is that the mixed evidence about self-monitoring and attitude accessibility is related to differences in the opportunity for self-presentation and deliberation inherent to study conditions. To illustrate this possibility, we would like to contrast two studies: DeBono et al. (1995) and Kardes et al. (1986), both of which have provided a detailed account of their respective methodologies. DeBono et al.'s study (1995) on attitudes toward capital punishment was conducted in computer-assisted group sessions, whereby “participants were assured that their responses would remain anonymous and that, for analysis purposes, data would be aggregated across participants” (DeBono et al., 1995, p. 272). In these conditions, it is plausible to hypothesize that participant motivation for self-presentation and deliberate answer was relatively low. Indeed, the study produced no difference in responses latencies between low-and high self-monitors. Kardes et al.’s (1986) study was also carried out via computer-assisted tasks. Unlike DeBono et al. (1995), however, it was conducted in three successive individual sessions, each of them lasting around one hour. In these conditions, participant motivation for self-presentation might have been higher than in the conditions reported by DeBono et al. (1995), resulting in a possibly higher hesitation – and therefore deliberation – for high self-monitors than low self-monitors. This, in turn, might have yielded significantly longer response latencies for high self-monitors than low self-monitors in Kardes et al.'s (1986) study.In light of this discussion, our purpose is to investigate whether the attitude accessibility hypothesis or the alternative self-presentation hypothesis explains better the difference between low- and high self-monitors in response latency tasks. Empirical support for the former would confirm that the attitude-to-behavior process, for low self-monitors at least, is moderated by attitude accessibility (Fazio, Powell & Williams, 1989; Kardes et al., 1986). However, empirical support for the latter hypothesis would bear intriguing new insights for both self-monitoring theory and experimental consumer psychology.MethodOur investigation relies on the methodological framework of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) (Greenwald, McGhee & Schwartz, 1998). The IAT has become a popular method for measuring the strength of automatically-activated associations between an attitude object and valence attributes (Fazio & Olson, 2003). The basic idea of the method is to compare response latencies between compatible vs. incompatible combinations of attitude objects (typically, categories) and valence attributes (typically, pleasant or unpleasant words). Both valence attributes and category concepts are usually represented in the IAT by word stimuli (e.g. unpleasant words: “ugly”, “disaster”, “tragedy”; pleasant words: “happy”, “lucky”, “love”; flower names: “tulip”, “rose”, “daisy”; insect names: “cockroach”, “ant”, “bug” etc.). The IAT isbased on the rationale that if a person has positive automatic associations about an attitude object, than this person should more easily (i.e. more quickly) associate pleasant words with that object. Thus, if a person has positive automatic associations about flowers (but not about insects), than he or she should more easily (i.e. more quickly) associate pleasant words with flower names than with insect names. This should result in shorter response latencies in the compatible task (flower names + pleasant words; insect names + unpleasant words) than in the incompatible task (flower names + unpleasant words; insect names + pleasant words).We systematically manipulated the environmental conditions: For a group of participants, IATs were conducted in a setting with low motivation for self-presentation; in another group, we set the IATs with high motivation for self-presentation. The attitude accessibility hypothesis predicts longer response latencies for high self-monitors than low self-monitors in either compatible- or incompatible tasks in any experimental condition. In this scenario, we can expect a main significant effect for self-monitoring. The alternative self-presentation hypothesis suggests that high self-monitors will only have longer response latencies in the high self-presentation condition (leading to a significant interaction effect between self-monitoring and experimental condition). Let us check which of the two alternative hypotheses is supported by empirical evidence.Preliminary StepsStudies were conducted with voluntary student participants from a large Swiss university. Category concepts and their associated word stimuli were selected on the basis of an exploratory study with sixty participants. To increase motivation for self-presentation, we chose a socially sensitive topic: knowledge structures about prestige. Participants were asked three paper-and-pencil tasks, which were the following: “Write down all the words that come to your mind about the word “prestige””; “Name brands that are the most prestigious in your eyes”; and “Namebrands that are the least prestigious in your eyes”. For each of the three questions, exactly one minute was allowed for answer. Word frequencies were calculated by using Szalay and Deese’s (1978) weighted method. For the first question, words were grouped into themes with the help of two judges. Six words pertaining to the concepts “high status”, “expensive products”, “fame” and “wealth” were selected as stimuli for the purposes of this study. For each of them, opposite categories (i.e. “low status”, “cheap products”, “anonymity” and “average revenue”) and six word stimuli were also generated. Then, the six most frequent prestige brands and the six most frequent non-prestige brands were selected based on answers to questions 2 and 3 and constituted the fifth category concept pair (“prestige brands” versus “common brands”). For the “pleasant” and “unpleasant” categories, we used stimuli randomly selected from the lists provided by Greenwald et al. (1998). On the basis of this preliminary study, five IATs were constructed, each of them containing a compatible- and an incompatible task. The full list of word stimuli in French and their English translations are included in the Appendix.Main StudyA first group of thirty-three students participated in group sessions on a voluntary basis. Upon arrival into a computer room equipped with workstations, participants were instructed that they would be taking part in a categorization study as part of a research project. They were instructed to answer as quickly as possible in the tasks and were assured that making mistakes was not a problem as long as they answered quickly. They were also assured that their answers were anonymous and that data would be treated in an aggregate analysis. The purpose of these instructions was to minimize the motivation for self-presentation in the course of the experiment. Participants then completed the five IATs.A second group of thirty-three volunteer students participated in individual sessions; personal appointments were fixed with each if them. Just as before, they were instructed toanswer as quickly as possible to a computer-assisted categorization exercise. In addition to this requirement, each participant was informed that she/he would be debriefed after the experiment; that her/his results would be compared with other people’s results and that these analyses could be sent to them if they wanted to. The purpose of these instructions was to increase motivation for self-presentation in the course of the experiment. Participants then completed the same five IATs as people in the group session.The Inquisit 1.33 software was used to run implicit association tasks(). The order of the compatible- vs. incompatible tasks was counterbalanced, as well as the order of the five IATs, as recommended by Greenwald, Nosek and Banaji (2003). IAT effects were calculated using the conventional IAT measure in the following sequence (Greenwald et al., 1998). Response latencies under 300 ms and over 3000 ms were recoded to 300 and 3000 ms, respectively. Then, means of log-transformed response latencies were comput ed for compatible blocks (e.g. prestige brands + pleasant and common brands + unpleasant) as well as incompatible blocks (e.g. prestige brands + unpleasant and common brands + pleasant). Differences of means between incompatible tasks (expected to yield longer response latencies) and compatible tasks (expected to yield shorter response latencies) served as measures of relative implicit association strength. In the case of the “brands” for example, a positive IAT effect indicates that prestige brands are more easily associated with positive words than with negative words in comparison with common brands.After completing the IAT s, we also elicited explicit consumer evaluations of the five concept pairs through a paper-and-pencil survey task. We used six-item, seven-point semantic differential scales similar to those used in previous studies (e.g. Swanson, Rudman & Greenwald, 2001). Finally, to assess self-monitoring scores, participants completed Snyder and Gangestad’s18-item True-False scale (Snyder & Gangestad, 1986). The whole procedure required between 35 and 40 minutes to complete.ResultsSummary StatisticsGroups of low- and high self-monitors were constituted using the conventional median-split technique, resulting in 35 people categorized as low self-monitors and 31 people as high self-monitors (median=9). The IAT effects, as measured by Greenwald et al’s (1998) conventional measure, are all positive and significantly different from zero (Status: mean .178 (t=7.81, p<.000), Brands: .219 (t=10.05, p<.000), Expensive: .0603 (t=2.43, p<.05), Fame: .248 (t=10.96, p<.000), Rich: .211 (t=8.51, p<.000)). Additional analyses showed that IAT results were not affected either by variations in self-monitoring, experimental condition or by the interaction between the two. Explicit attitude measures of the category concepts were not significantly affected by these variations either, resulting in negative judgments about h igh status (-3.61 on a –36 to +36 scale) and expensive products (-12.66); positive judgments about prestige brands (3.41) and wealth (8.56); and a rather neutral view of fame (-.609). (Detailed results of all these analyses are available upon request to the interested reader). These results indicated that our sample had positive automatically-activated associations about status, prestige brands, expensive products, fame and wealth. At the explicit level, some of these categories were judged positively while others negatively, but no differences were attributable to the participant’s self-monitoring level.TestsLet us now have a closer look at response latency patterns. We propose a detailed analysis of both the compatible- and incompatible blocks in each of the five IATs. ANOVAs were performed using the log-transformed response latencies as dependent variable and self-monitoring (low vs. high) and experimental condition (group vs. individual) as factors. Results from these ten analyses of variance are reported in table 1 and depicted in figure 1. Table 1 shows that none of the main effects reach significance by conventional standards. However, four out of ten interaction effects are significant by conventional standards and further three of them reach margina l significance (see table 1). Despite the fact that not all the interactions are significant, figure 1 depicts the same consistent pattern of phenomena in each of the five IATs: Low self-monitors respond faster in the individual sessions than in the group sessions. The reverse is true of high self-monitors, since they are faster in group sessions than in individual ones.To check the robustness of the effects across the five experiments, we ran a MANOVA by considering the response latencies in the ten conditions as repeated measures. The results confirm the pattern of between-subject effects observed in figure 1: the main effect of self-monitoring is non-significant (F=.474, p=.494), the main effect of experimental condition i s non-significant (F=.645, p=.425) and the self-monitoring x experimental condition interaction is significant(F=5.52, p=.022). The lack of main effect for self-monitoring fails to provide support to Kardes et al.’s (1986) first hypothesis – namely, that the attitude accessibility of low self-monitors is higher than that of high self-monitors. Indeed, we found no difference in response latencies between low- and high self-monitors in the group sessions (F=1.823, p=.187). As predicted by the alternative self-presentation hypothesis, we observe a flat slope across experimental conditions for low self-monitors (F=1.11, p=.30) and a positive slope for high self-monitors(F=5.63, p=.024). These results provide support for Kardes et al.’s (1986) second hypothesis, namely, that high self-monitors deliberate more in attitude response tasks if there is sufficient motivation for self-presentation.In the group condition, there was only one instruction: the requirement that participants to respond as quickly as possible. Both high- and low self-monitors seem to have followed thisinstruction carefully. Since this was the only situational cue available, high self-monitors followed it even more than low self-monitors, resulting in somewhat shorter response latencies. In the individual condition, participants were also told to answer as fast as possible but, in addition, they were told that they would be debriefed after the experiment and that their results could be compared to other participant’s results. In this scenario, as before, low self-monitors followed the first instruction – they answered as fast as possible. In contrast, high self-monitors were more sensitive to the second piece of information – that they would be debriefed and that their results could be compared to other people’s results. Since the individual experimental condition offered much more motivation for self-presentation, high self-monitors plausibly deliberated more in their answers than low self-monitors.DiscussionThe purpose of this study was to investigate two alternative expl anations for a result first reported by Kardes et al. (1986) – namely, that low self-monitors had longer response latencies in implicit cognition tasks than high self-monitors. We found no main effect for self-monitoring in response latencies, either in compatible or incompatible IAT tasks. However, we found an overall robust interaction effect between experimental condition and self-monitoring, showing that in high-motivation conditions only did self-monitors have longer response latencies than low self-monitors. In Kardes et al.’s (1986) research, the experimental conditions were comparable to ours in the high motivation condition, allowing for considerable self-presentation opportunity. In contrast to this, DeBono et al. (1995) used group sessions, which minimized self-presentational concerns and obtained no difference between low- and high self-monitors with respect to response latencies. We have also found similar results in the group conditions. Overall, these finding s paint a consistent picture and provide a support for the explanation that high self-monitors hesitate and deliberate more in high-motivation conditions than in low-motivationconditions. If motivation for self-presentation increases, low self-monitors carry out attitude tasks in much the same way as previously; whereas high self-monitors, although their automatic associations are equally accessible, tend to hesitate more to “push the right button”.These results have major implications for research in consumer psychology. First of all, our findings suggest that self-monitoring is not related to the issue of attitude accessibility. On mere presentation of an attitude object, either positive or negative associations may be spontaneously activated, be the person a low- or a high self-monitor. Implicit association measures correspond to automatic, non-deliberative association strength between an attitude object (in our case, status-related category concepts) and valence attributes in memory. They are typically elicited unobtrusively in conditions of a very limited time frame so that subjects do not have the opportunity to deliberate on their judgments. These automatic associations may be interpreted as the sum of both stereotypes and personal experience with attitude objects in a specific cultural environment (Fazio & Olson, 2003; Greenwald et al., 1998; Karpinski & Hilton, 2001). When automatic associations are elicited by using a category as stimulus, Fazio and Olson (2003) argue that culture-bound, environmental associations may most easily come to the participant's mind. Empirical evidence also supports the view that “the IAT taps the associations a person has been exposed to in his or her environment, not the individual’s level of endorsement regarding the attitude object” (Karpinski & Hilton, 2001, p. 786). In the present study, the dominance of positive automatic associations (i.e. positive IAT effects) may well reflect socially shared stereotypical associations about status and status-related topics such as fame, wealth, expensive products an d prestige brands. In low self-presentational conditions, these cultural stereotypes were apparent for both low- and high self-monitors. In high self-presentational conditions, the same cultural stereotypes may first come to people's mind; however, right afterthis, a deliberative processing may be triggered for high self-monitors, resulting in significantly longer response latencies than in a low self-presentational condition.In the introduction, we referred to research showing that low self-monitors form judgments and display behavior that are more consistent with their attitudes than high self-monitors (Ajzen, Timko & White, 1982; DeBono & Omoto, 1993; Kraus, 1995). In light of our results we argue that low self-monitors may well exhibit behaviors which are consistent with their explicit judgments about attitude objects; we can also expect high self-monitors to deviate more in behavior from their previously reported, again explicit judgments. In addition to this, low- and high self-monitors may differ in the extent to which they rely on automatic associations to make explicit evaluations of attitude objects before forming an appropriate behavior. W e therefore believe that considerable differences may emerge between low- and high self-monitors with respect to the congruence between implicit and explicit measures of their attitude responses. According to Fazio and Olson (2003), in conditions where motivation and opportunity for deliberation are high, the consistency between implicit and explicit attitude measures should be higher than in conditions of low motivation and/or opportunity. Therefore low self-monitors, since their motivation for public self-presentation is lower, may possibly rely more on their automatically-activated associations to make conscious explicit judgments about attitude objects. By contrast, high self-monitors would do less so since they, in addition to their spontaneous associations, would take into account many situational factors to form explicit judgments. The corroboration of these propositions is an interesting topic for future empirical inquiry.One of the key motivations for the development of unobtrusive, implicit attitude measures was precisely the idea that these measures could be resistant to self-presentation (Fazio & Olson, 2003). Overall, our results are suggestive of the conclusion that even implicit measures of attitudes could have a motivational component. Some studies have reported that the IAT effectmay not influenced by faking or self-presentational artefacts (e.g. Banse, Seise & Zerbes, 2001; Egloff & Schmukle, 2002). However, these studies did not take into account the level of self-monitoring – that is, the extent to which people deliberately manage their public appearance. Furthermore, these studies did not systematically vary the experimental conditions and focussed only on the pure IAT effect – that is, the difference in response latencies between incompatible and compatible tasks. Indeed, our results did not show differences related to level of self-monitoring in the pure IAT effects either, so the conventional IAT seems indeed to be resistant to the self-presentation artefact. That is,high self-monitors responded slower in individual sessions, but they did so for both compatible and incompatible tasks.However, in conditions conducive to self-presentation, differences between low- and high self-monitors with respect to absolute response latencies in compatible and incompatible tasks do emerge. This flags warning signs for implicit attitude measures that - unlike the IAT - do not require contrast categories, such as priming (Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell & Kardes, 1986) and the go-no go association task (Nosek & Banaji, 2001). High self-monitors may actually not give fully spontaneous answers to stimuli objects in these tests. While awaiting further corroboration, our results in the compatible- and incompatible tasks of a series of IATs suggest that cognitive deliberation may occur in other similar methods, too.The evidence reported here strongly suggests that implicit cognition tasks – just as explicit ones – may be sensitive to self-presentation effects, but only in special experimental conditions and for people who do exert expressive control over their behavior. This leads us to conclude, in agreement with Fazio and Olson, that “an implicitly measured attitude should not be assumed to be nonconscious” (Fazio & Olson, 2003, p. 318). We believe the reliability and validity of applied research using implicit cognition measures would certainly be increased by using experimental conditions that minimize the opportunity for self-presentation.ReferencesAjzen, I., Timko, C., & White, J. B. (1982). 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