Mental processes become more automatic with repetition—the more often we activate a mental representation, the easier it becomes to access. Since we see our own name and face so often in daily life, accessing our self-concept should be more effortless than accessing information about others.
To test this, we used a cognitive interference task with two difficulty levels. In the easy session, participants simply decided whether a name, surname, birthplace, or nationality shown on the screen referred to them. The words were written in either lowercase or uppercase, but the letter case didn’t matter.
In the harder session, participants had to make the same decision—but only when the words were in lowercase, adding an extra challenge. We predicted that if self-related processing is truly automatic, it would cause less interference with the letter-case task.
That’s exactly what we found: self-related information led to less cognitive interference than information about others. This suggests that accessing self-concept is indeed more effortless than thinking about others.
Full text:
Tacikowski, P., T. Freiburghaus, T., Ehrsson, H. H. (2017). Goal-directed processing of self-relevant information is associated with less cognitive interference than the processing of information about other people. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 68: 93-100. (PDF)
