The Effect Of Implicit Self-enhancement To Interpersonal Attraction Basing On Han Nationality Surnames

Implicit self-enhancement, also known as implicit egoism, implicit arrogant,unconscious self-enhancement, refers to people’s unconscious self-enhancement. Itmeans people’s positive emotions to themselves will improve their liking to thingsassociate with themselves. This unconditional positive feelings of self will migrate totheir evaluation to things associate with themselves. Implicit self-enhancement will beinfluenced by factors such as information characteristics, emotional experience,self-esteem, self-concept, social situation and cultural factors and so on.On the basis of implicit self-enhancement theory, any kinds of similarity relatedto self-concept can inspire interpersonal attraction, and this kind of natural attractionis unconscious, even can not be perceived by participants. Some researchers havepointed out that the self-enhancement motivation of Chinese is more implicit and noteasy to be examined directly. So implicit method may be more applicable to exploreself-enhancement motivation of Chinese or Oriental.Nowadays, the cross-cultural universality of implicit self-enhancement is still ahot research topic. Foreign scholars have done many researches on it, butpsychologists in our country have been lack of empirical research on this issue. In thispaper, we investigated people’s implicit self-enhancement and its effects oninterpersonal attraction under China’s situation through two empirical studies.In first study, we investigated96college students’ intensity of implicitself-esteem and their implicit attitude to their surnames by using experimental methodof IAT paradigm.In second study, we investigated these students’ evaluation of the characters inadvertisement under four kinds of conditions. The four kinds of conditions is thecharacter’s surnames associated with their surnames or not, self-concept threatened orno threatened. Also we investigated the participants’ chooses of partner when there is atask. That means, we investigated whether the implicit self-enhancement will influence the characters’ attraction to participants.Through the two studies above, we mainly draws the following conclusions:(1) Participants tend to associate their surnames with the characteristics of positivewords. Also, they tend to link irrelevant surnames with characteristics ofnegative words.(2) Implicit association test can be used to measure the implicit self-enhancement, butit is not sensitive enough, so we can use other test as a complement.(3) Surnames can motivate participants’ implicit self-enhancement. Participants showmore preference to partners whose surnames are consistent with themselves.(4) Self-concept was threatened or not can also stimulate participants’ implicitself-enhancement. When self-concept was threatened, participants improved theirpreference for partners.(5) Whether self-concept is being threatened or not, participants prefer partnerswhose surnames consisted with themselves.(6) People will consider other person’s surnames when choosing partners. And theyshow preference to them.