The Influence Of Fundamental Dimensions Of Social Cognition On Self-Esteem

Communion and Agency are proposed by David· Bakan to "characterize two fundamental modalities in the existence of living forms, agency for the existence of an organism as an individual, and communion for the participation for the individual in some lager organism of which the individual is a part". Previous studies have found that when individuals perceive others, there is a primacy of communion than agency, however, when people judge themselves or important ones,the effect of primacy of communion will decreases even reverses,and agency will come up with great importance. As known that self-esteem is a consequence that comes from one’s self-evaluation, there comes one question that which one of fundamental dimension would be the one that have great influence on one’s self-esteem? And does the influence of fundamental dimension on one’s explicit self-esteem still work the some way on one’implicit self-esteem? In order to explore all these questions, three studies were done.In the first study, we use resenberg self-esteem scale and an traits list which include vocabularies which can be categorized into agency and communion to explore the influence of people’s evaluation based on fundamental dimension on their self-esteem. The result indicated that agency is of the great importance on one’s self-esteem. Including positive agentic traits and negative agentic trait. Negative communal trait is vital to one’s self-esteem.In the second (a) study, we conduct an experiment that participants receive feedback that is positive or negative on people’s communal traits, Under the former condition, participants will be feedbacked as a people who get positive communal traits such as kind, enthusiasm,warm and polite. Under the latter condition, participants will be feedbacked as cold, mean and even dishonest. In this way, we try to make people change their evaluation on the communal traits, so we can explore the influence on people self-esteem when people change their evaluation on communal trait. As results show that, the conduct is indeed lead to the changes on one’s evaluation on communal traits especially on participants who get positive feedback. Self-esteem also changed in consequence, AVONA found the influence of self-evaluation change of their communal traits on self-esteem. In the (b) part of second study, we use an easy/difficult task to make people feel succes or failure, which may influence one’s evaluation on their agentic traits, to explore the influence of people’s change on their evaluation of agentic traits on people’s self-esteem. The results show the changes of people’s evaluation on their agentic traits and changes on self-esteem in consequence. However, AVONA did not found the influence of self-evaluation change of their agentic traits on self-esteem.In the last study, an implicit association test was conduct to explore the influence of one’s self-evaluation which based on fundamental dimension on people’s implicit self-esteem. Differ with the great importance of agency when explore the influence of fundamental dimension on people’s explicit self-esteem, people’s evaluation on fundamental dimension can not predict implicit self-esteem, and this pattern shows no differ between male and female.