| | Most people like themselves. High levels of self-esteem may have implications
for behavior and decision-making. Recent studies have shown that people tend to move
toward cities that resemble their personal names. Also, people choose jobs that have
names that resemble their own names. Furthermore, it was found that people’s decisions
to live in a particular street and to marry a particular person, are (at least partly) based on
the similarities of the names of, respectively, these streets and persons with their own
name. Thus, Michiel is more likely to live in Munstergeleen, to become a musician and to
live in the Meishagerstraat, than one would expect on the basis of chance.
The unconscious preference for stimuli that are associated with the self was
called implicit egotism. Most people feel good about themselves. As a consequence, they
like objects that are associated with the self. Our names are stimuli that are closely
associated with our self and, therefore, the letters constituting our name, i.e., our name
letters, are highly representative for our identity. The idea underlying implicit egotism is
that positive feelings about our self result in positive feelings about anything that is
associated with our self. So, the more positive we feel about our self, the more positive
we evaluate stimuli that are more or less part of our self. Consequently, if Michiel feels
good about himself, he should show a preference for self-relevant stimuli, e.g., musician,
Meishagerstraat, and the village of Munstergeleen. The theory would also predict that if
Michiel does not feel good about himself, he should prefer neither musician, nor
Meishagerstraat, nor Munstergeleen.
However, although these feelings about oneself are a central and crucial aspect
of the theory of implicit egotism, they were not taken into account in the studies
described above. We would expect that name letter effects should only be observed for
people who feel good about themselves (i.e., have highly positive implicit self-esteem),
but not for people who feel less good or even bad about themselves (i.e., have low or
even negative implicit self-esteem). In the present thesis we aimed to investigate how
people vary in the evaluation of self-associated objects.
In Chapter 2 we add an entirely new area to implicit egotism research. We
reasoned that if people evaluate their name letters more positively, they might use their
name letters more in texts. This hypothesis was confirmed: In three studies we showed
that people tend to overuse their name letters in written texts. In Study 2.1 it was
demonstrated that authors of Journal of Personality and Social Psychology articles use
their name letters more often in their abstracts than one would expect based on general
letter frequencies in these abstracts. In Study 2.2 we found that people not only show an
overuse of name letters in formal and scrutinized texts, but also in written texts about
more trivial everyday topics. In Study 2.3 we demonstrated that people show an overuse
of name letters in words with a positive meaning and that people tend to avoid words with
a negative meaning. In these studies we also found that in formal situations people tend
to overuse the letters of their last name and that in informal situations people tend to
overuse the letters of their first name. However, we did not find the expected moderating
effect of implicit self-esteem.
In Chapter 3 we investigated the moderating role of implicit self-esteem in
implicit egotism effects. In Study 3.1 participants were exposed to an advertisement of a
bicycle. Within the self-relevance condition, the name of the bike started with the first two
letters of the participant’s first name. Within the control condition the bike’s name started
with two non-name letters. Subsequently, participants evaluated the bike. Afterwards,
implicit self-esteem was measured by the name letter effect. Evaluations of the
self-referring bike were found to be more positive among high self-esteem individuals
compared to low self-esteem individuals. In Study 3.2 we replicated this effect by using
an advertisement of a DVD-player, which name was manipulated by using the first two
letters of the first name of the participants and their birthday number (in the
self-relevance condition). In this study we found that people with high self-esteem
evaluated the self-relevant DVD-player better than the player that was not self-relevant.
Across these two studies we showed that implicit evaluations of the self indeed
moderate implicit egotism effects. Products were evaluated more positively by high
self-esteem participants than low self-esteem participants when the brand name of that
product included name letters (Study 3.1) or name letters and birthday numbers (Study
3.2). These effects are in line with the idea that the degree of positivity associated with
the self moderates the strength of implicit egotism effects. In other words, products that
referred to the self were liked better by individuals who have positive implicit self
associations.
In Chapter 4 we investigated two effects that can be considered as special
manifestations of implicit egotism: the mere ownership effect and the endowment effect
(Once an object is owned, it become more attractive or valuable). In Study 4.1, we
studied the effects of implicit self-esteem on object evaluations in two conditions: In the
possession condition we gave the object to the participant for a present, while in the
control condition we did not. Subsequently, we asked participants to explicitly evaluate
the object. We predicted that implicit self-esteem was related to object evaluations in the
possession condition, but not in the control condition. The results were consistent with
this hypothesis: we found that people high in implicit self-esteem evaluated the pen when
owned more positively than the same pen when they did not own it. People low in
implicit self-esteem did not show this effect. Thus, the level of implicit self-esteem
moderates the mere ownership effect.
Study 4.2 followed up on this first study, by directly testing the endowment effect
(once an object is owned, it becomes more valuable) as a function of differences in
self-esteem. If the endowment effect can be partly explained by the mere ownership
effect, we would expect that implicit self-esteem would also moderate the endowment
effect. In Study 4.2 we first measured implicit self-evaluations. One or two weeks later,
participants returned to the laboratory and did or did not receive a pen as a gift. In the
possession condition, participants were asked for how much money they were willing to
sell this pen. In the control condition, they were asked how much money they wanted to
pay for this pen. As expected, we found that people with high implicit self-esteem
allocated a higher price to a pen they owned than to the same pen when they did not own
it. People low in implicit self-esteem did not allocate a higher price to the pen when they
owned it. So the endowment effect is moderated by differences in self-associations as
indicated by our implicit self-esteem measure.
The studies in Chapter 4 provide new and convincing evidence for the crucial
role of psychological processes in the endowment effect. Differences in the allocation of
monetary value as a function of selling and buying can be partly related to loss aversion
in selling. However, since selling always implies that you assign value to something you
possess, self-evaluation processes come into play. Our research shows that people
differ in their appreciation of the things they own. Their implicit self-esteem spills over to
the things they possess.
Together, the studies in the present dissertation offer a systematic
demonstration of the moderating role of positive self-associations in implicit egotism
effects. In four studies, we demonstrated the role of implicit self-esteem on the evaluation
of an object that was either self-related or not. However, this moderating role of implicit
self-esteem was lacking in the studies of Chapter 2 on preferential name letter use in
written texts. In Chapter 5 we elaborated on possible explanations for the differential
effects of the moderating role of positive self-associations and discussed implications and
suggestions for future research.
One contribution of the present research is that it shifted the boundaries of what
needs to be explained by introducing yet another area in which name letter-related
egotism was demonstrated: the overuse of name letters in written texts, which was
particularly shown to be the case with positive words. Moreover, this dissertation
accomplished something that implicit egotism research so far has not been able to do,
namely complete the logical argument concerning implicit egotism effects in the sense
that it represents a spill-over of positive self-associations to anything that is -one way or
another- linked to the self.
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