Social Desirability, Task Difficulty, The Impact Of Internal And Implicit Self-esteem And Explicit Self-esteem Relationship

With the emergence of Implicit Association Test developed by Greenwald (1995), the research on implicit cognition has become the hotspot gradually. The purpose of this paper was to explore the third variable, whether or not moderate the correlation between implicit self-esteem and explicit self-esteem. Social desirability and difficulty selection were taken as the third variable here.The first experiment was to explore the moderate foundation of social anticipation to the correlation between implicit self-esteem and explicit self-esteem. One hundred and five college students completed Marlow-Crowne Social Desirability Scale, Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale and Implicit Association Test (IAT). It was concluded that the correlation between implicit self-esteem and explicit self-esteem in the group with high social desirability was lower than another in the group with low social desirability(r high=.06, n high=16, p high=.82;r low=-.31, n low=18, p low=.22), however these two correlation values couldn't be significant.The second experiment was to look for whether or not there was difference between implicit attitude and explicit attitude to two different behaviors (take dope and drink), which were or weren't influenced by social desirability. 77 elite athletes in Sport University completed the Attitude Scale to Dope and Attitude Scale to Drink and IAT. It was found that there was a small difference between Implicit and explicit attitude (r dope=.03, n dope=45, p dope=.87;r drink=-.07, n drink=45, p drink=.67), also the direction of difference was the same as ones of hypothesis . But this difference was not significant.The third and forth experiment were to explore the moderate foundation of difficulty selection to the correlation between implicit and explicit self-esteem. 105 students in the third study and 79 students in the forth study finished the two tasks selection, Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale and IAT. It was concluded that the participants who selected the medium difficulty task, their correlation between implicit and explicit self-esteem was higher than another group, who selected the extreme (highest and lowest) difficulty task (in the third study: r extreme=-.02, n extreme=48, p extreme=.89;r medium=.12, n medium=33, p medium=.52;in the forth study: r extreme =.12, n extreme=20, p extreme=.63; r medium=.23, n medium=49, p medium=.12), also the direction of difference was the same as ones of hypothesis . The difference, however, was not significant.All the results above seem to support the hypothesis in direction, but the difference between correlations was not significant, and underlying reasons were discussed in this paper.