European Journal of Personality, Eur. J. Pers. (2011) Published online (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/per.826
Automatic Activation of Individual Differences: A Test of the Gatekeeper Model in the Domain of Spontaneous Helping MARCO PERUGINI1*, MARK CONNER2 and RICK O’GORMAN3 1
Faculty of Psychology, University of Milan‐Bicocca, Italy Institute of Psychological Sciences, University of Leeds, UK 3 Department of Psychology, University of Essex, UK 2
Abstract: The influence of stable individual differences on behaviour need not solely rely upon deliberative processes but can also be exerted through automatic associative processes. In this contribution, three studies that illustrate the role of individual differences in automaticity are presented in the domain of helping behaviour. The first study provides evidence both for a double dissociation and for an additive pattern of implicit and explicit measures in predicting relevant altruistic behaviours. The subsequent two studies show that when the concept of altruism is subliminally primed, individual differences in implicit attitudes significantly predict behaviour. The results are in line with the gatekeeper model, and their implications are discussed focusing on the key role of individual differences in modulating automaticity effects. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Key words: implicit; explicit; helping; priming; gatekeeper
INTRODUCTION Stable individual differences in attitudes and traits have an important function both in the aetiology and in the prediction of human behaviour, yet their influence does not need to rely upon deliberative processes. Recent research in personality has started to focus on the role of individual differences in basic cognitive processes that can lead from perception to behaviour in a few hundred milliseconds (Robinson, 2007). These influences do not rely much on deliberative processes; on the contrary, they concern quick associative processes leading to spontaneous behaviour. One typical experimental manipulation that is predicated to elicit associative processes is priming (Bargh, 2006). As a matter of fact, priming manipulations, especially subliminal ones, are often used to demonstrate the so‐called automaticity of human behaviour (Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001). Bright objects are automatically evaluated as good (Meier, Robinson, & Clore, 2004); clean scents promote charitable behaviour (Liljenquist, Zhong, & Galinsky, 2010), but dark rooms increase dishonest behaviour (Zhong, Lake, & Gino, 2010). These effects are based on a common principle: perception of certain features of the environment (cues) can solicit a behavioural schema as long as there is a link between the environmental cues and some related motivationally imbued cognitive activities (e.g. goal activation). There is no need for conscious awareness or regulation for the activation of these cognitive activities; hence, the process is often referred to as
*Correspondence to: Marco Perugini, Faculty of Psychology, University of Milan‐Bicocca, Building U6, Piazza dell’Ateneo Nuovo 1, 20126 Milan, Italy. E‐mail:
[email protected]
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2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
automaticity (Bargh, Gollwitzer, Lee‐Chai, Barndollar, & Troetschel, 2001) or the perception–behaviour automatic link (Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001). These implicit processes can be distinguished from deliberative processes that occur, for instance, when someone decides to act after having consciously engaged in reflective considerations. From a measurement and an individual differences perspective, the distinction between these two types of processes can be at least partly reflected in two different types of measures. Implicit versus explicit measures The distinction between implicit and explicit measures of attitudes and personality echoes the surge of interest in dual process models and theories in psychology and especially social cognition (for recent reviews, see Deutsch & Strack, 2010; Evans, 2008). A number of recent social cognitive models, such as the reflective–impulsive model (RIM; Strack & Deutsch, 2004), propose a distinction between fast and uncontrolled associative/automatic processes and slow and controlled propositional/deliberative processes. The RIM assumes that the two processes can interact at various stages and can both affect behaviour. This distinction among processes is reflected also in the use of different measures (implicit/associative/indirect vs explicit/deliberative/direct) that tap primarily into one of the two systems or processes, and research has started to accumulate showing the conditions under which either measure is more likely to predict behaviour (for a recent review, see Perugini, Richetin, & Zogmaister, 2010). One such condition is the spontaneity versus deliberativeness of the behaviour. As shown by Asendorpf, Banse, and Mücke (2002), a theoretically sound pattern consists of implicit measures predicting spontaneous or uncontrolled Received 28 July 2010 Revised 21 March 2011, Accepted 21 March 2011
M. Perugini et al. behaviour and explicit measures predicting deliberative or planned behaviour but not vice versa. This pattern, called double dissociation, has received empirical support in a number of studies although it is just one of a number of theoretically meaningful prediction patterns (cf. Perugini et al., 2010, p. 258). Another interesting pattern is additive, implying that both implicit and explicit measures predict the same behaviour. This pattern also has received ample empirical support, and its interest lies in the fact that it provides evidence of incremental validity for both types of measures as well as indication that the behaviour is probably mixed in terms of the spontaneous versus deliberative processes involved (cf. Moors & De Houwer, 2006). A third interesting pattern is moderation, in which a moderator is assumed to affect the predictive validity of an implicit or explicit measure. This third pattern is theoretically important because it can provide increased theoretical understanding of the underlying processes. Indeed, this pattern corresponds to what the gatekeeper model predicts as a consequence of the effect of a priming manipulation, as we shall argue in the succeeding section. The gatekeeper model An important but often neglected question concerns the role of stable individual differences, such as personality traits, motives and attitudes, in automatic processes. Recently, Perugini and Prestwich (2007) proposed the gatekeeper model in order to provide a theoretical framework for the role of stable individual differences in automatic processes. The main idea behind the gatekeeper model is that perception of external events (e.g. environmental cues, priming manipulations) has to be processed by an individual before soliciting any kind of behavioural (re)action. However, individuals can differ systematically and reliably in how they perceive, process and react to environmental cues. This simple notion has wide‐ ranging implications. Probably, the most important of these implications is that reliable individual differences, either in terms of attitudes or personality traits, have a key role in the transition from perception to behaviour, even for automatic processes. It follows that behaviour can depend on individual differences in the mental content that is automatically activated by environmental cues in a specific circumstance, rather than just being an inflexible and direct consequence of the cues themselves. More specifically, the gatekeeper model postulates that when certain cognitive content is activated, its effect on behaviour depends on individual differences in the valence of the concept being activated. There is recent empirical evidence supporting this key prediction of the gatekeeper model. Perugini and Prestwich (2007) presented results of one study in which an implicit measure of attitudes towards Americans, by using the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998), predicted a positive evaluation of an essay using Anglo‐American spelling but only when the concept ‘American’ was activated unobtrusively via a scrambling sentence task. Similarly, Slabbinck, De Houwer, and Van Kenhove (2011) have shown that an implicit measure of power predicted the use of power‐related words in an autobiographical narrative but only when the power motive was previously aroused. Richetin, Richardson, and Mason Copyright
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(2010) also have shown that an IAT measuring the self‐concept of aggressiveness predicted indirect aggressive behaviour (i.e. negative evaluation of the experimenter) but only under conditions of provocation. Besides the differences in the domains and constructs measured (attitudes or personality self‐ concepts), what is common to these studies is that the moderation effect predicated by the gatekeeper model was found for the implicit but not the explicit measures. Spontaneous helping and automaticity Prosocial behaviour, of which spontaneous helping is a prominent example, is one of the most studied topics in social psychology and personality (for a review, see Penner, Dovidio, Schroeder, & Piliavin, 2005). A wide range of studies have focused on various determinants of prosocial behaviour, including situational factors such as induced empathy (e.g. Batson et al., 1997) and personality factors such as agreeableness (e.g. Caprara, Alessandri, Di Giunta, Panerai, & Eisenberg, 2010). Some studies have started to investigate the role in determining spontaneous helping of fast and uncontrolled associative processes, usually experimentally manipulated via priming. For example, Garcia, Weaver, Moskowitz, and Darley (2002) showed that priming a group context, by asking participants to imagine being in a group, reduced willingness to help in a subsequent task (i.e. minutes volunteered for another experiment) in line with an (implicit) bystander effect. Nelson and Norton (2005) found that priming the concept of superhero increased the amount of time people were willing to volunteer for a charity compared with a neutral control condition. Greitemeyer (2009a) showed that listening to songs with prosocial lyrics increased subsequent helping behaviour (e.g. donation to charity) via increased empathy (Greitemeyer, 2009b). Subliminally priming words related to a social group associated with helping (i.e. nurses), Aarts et al. (2005) found increased helping (i.e. time voluntarily devoted to provide feedback for a project) compared with a control condition. Interestingly, this priming effect was moderated by individual differences in goal strength (i.e. importance of helping people), such that priming had a significant effect on helping behaviour only for those with a strong helping goal. Of particular interest to this discussion is the contribution by Zemack‐Rugar, Bettman, and Fitzsimons (2007). The authors found that subliminally priming guilt‐related words (using parafoveal presentation with 60‐ms exposure and backward masking) increased subsequent spontaneous helping (i.e. time volunteered to help a charity by helping in packing material) compared with a condition with subliminally primed sad‐related words. However, the effects were moderated by individual differences in guilt proneness (Tangney, Wagner, & Gramzow, 1992) such that only individuals high in guilt proneness showed increased helping when the concept of guilt was non‐consciously activated via subliminal priming. Both these and the previous results by Aarts et al. (2005) are in line with the general idea of the gatekeeper model although it should be noted that in both cases, the moderating effect was found with explicit measures (goal strength and guilt proneness) and that the activated concepts (social groups and guilt) and the performed Eur. J. Pers. (2011) DOI: 10.1002/per
Spontaneous helping behaviour (helping) were not the same, although they were conceptually related. To sum up, there is recent evidence showing that spontaneous helping can be affected automatically (i.e. without the need of deliberative processing) by priming relevant concepts and that this perception–behaviour link can be moderated by relevant individual differences. However, we are not aware of studies in which implicit measures of altruism, either as implicit attitude or self‐concept, have been used to investigate their predictive validity. Moreover, to our knowledge, no study has investigated whether directly priming the concept of helping affects spontaneous helping behaviour and whether individual differences gauged by implicit measures relative to altruism moderate the effect, as the gatekeeper model would predict. Aims of the present research The first aim of this present research was to test different patterns of predictions of implicit and explicit measures that have been hypothesized in the relevant literature, as we have previously reviewed. The second and central aim was to test a key assumption of the gatekeeper model, namely that individual differences in the valence of an automatically activated concept predict behaviour. We present three studies in the domain of spontaneous helping by using both implicit and explicit measures related to altruism and by testing the expected moderation effect. All three studies include actual behaviours performed in a relatively spontaneous manner in an experimental context. More specifically, the first study is focused on the first aim by testing different patterns of predictions by using a range of implicit and explicit measures related to altruism and some dependent variables that vary across a continuum from more deliberative to more spontaneous. The other two studies are designed to test experimentally the main tenet of the gatekeeper model.
STUDY 1 The main aim of this study was to test different patterns of predictions for implicit and explicit measures relating to altruism. We investigated whether implicit attitude and implicit self‐concept, measured via two IATs, and explicit attitude and personality measures (helpfulness and other‐oriented empathy, taken from the Prosocial Personality Battery (PPB) of Penner, 2002) were able to predict three different behaviours at different levels of spontaneity and specificity. Method Participants One hundred fourteen participants (47 men, 67 women, mean age = 24.3 years, SD = 4.7) were recruited and were paid £8 for their participation in the study. Procedure Participants attended for two sessions. For the initial session, they were led individually to the testing booth, given a brief Copyright
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overview of the study, instructed on the use of the computer and then requested to attend carefully to the instructions. They completed first the explicit measures, followed by the two IATs and finally the volunteering measures. On‐screen instructions at the end of the computerized session informed participants to return to the experimenter’s office to schedule their return visit a week later. In the second session, participants were asked to complete a short series of computerized measures unrelated to this study. After completing the tasks, participants returned to the experimenter’s office, were paid and were thanked. The behavioural measure occurred at this point in time. Just as each participant exited the experimenter’s office, the experimenter called them back and showed them a small poster located on a noticeboard opposite the office door. The experimenter said, ‘I was asked by a student to show this to participants doing my study, they have just started looking for people, maybe you are interested’. The experimenter then shrugged shoulders to indicate indifference, said thanks and goodbye again to the participant to reinforce ‘termination’ of the study and walked back into the office, closing the door. The poster was written in the first person as a student seeking participants for a perception study. Participants were sought to voluntarily partake—it was explicitly stated that there would be no financial reward but the fictitious student did offer ‘endless gratitude’. Beneath the poster text, there was a space for volunteers to write their name, email and how long (in blocks of 10 minutes) they were willing to volunteer. To keep conditions constant for all participants and to avoid the possibility that volunteering could have been influenced by implicit social pressures, the poster did not contain any other name when viewed by a participant (e.g. if a participant volunteered, the poster was replaced with an empty one for the next participant). Materials All measures were presented to the participants by using Inquisit (Millisecond Software LLC, Seattle, WA, USA). Participants responded by use of a computer keyboard and a Cedrus response box (model RB‐730; Cedrus Corporation, San Pedro, CA, USA). The specific measures are presented in the order in which they were administered. Explicit attitudes The explicit attitude measure consisted of six semantic differential scales (bad–good, foolish–wise, unpleasant– pleasant, negative–positive, unenjoyable–enjoyable, stupid– intelligent) on a 7‐step answer scale, anchored with very at each end. The scales were preceded by the stem ‘I think that to be helpful for me is’. Prosocial Personality Battery The reduced version of the PPB developed by Penner (2002) consists of 30 items that have been selected as best markers from the original longer 56‐item version (Penner, Fritzsche, Craiger, & Freifeld, 1995). The PPB yields two primary dimensions, helpfulness (8 items) and other‐oriented empathy (22 items), that in turn consist of seven individual subscales: personal distress (reversed score) and self‐reported altruism belong to the helpfulness factor; social responsibility, empathic concern, perspective taking, other‐oriented moral Eur. J. Pers. (2011) DOI: 10.1002/per
M. Perugini et al. reasoning and mutual concerns moral reasoning belong to the other‐oriented empathy factor. Items were answered using a 5‐point scale, either from strongly disagree to strongly agree or from never to very often (self‐reported altruism). Implicit associations tests We used two versions of the IAT, with both implementations following the standard format (cf. Greenwald et al., 1998) of five steps, with the first, second and fourth steps being practice and the third and fifth steps being the critical test blocks. The two IATs differed in that one measured implicit attitudes towards altruism and the other the implicit altruistic self‐ concept. The paired target categories for the attitude IAT were altruistic (helpful, altruistic, kind, generous, cooperative) and individualistic (individualistic, self‐centred, self‐interested, selfish, cynical). The attribute categories were positive (good, pleasure, pretty, peace, smile) and negative (evil, pain, ugly, war, murder). For the altruistic self‐concept IAT, the attribute categories were me (I, me, my, mine, self) and others (they, them, their, them, other), whereas the target categories were the same as for the attitude IAT. For each IAT, there were 62 trials in the critical blocks, with the first two being dummy trials (to be discarded). Both IATs were counterbalanced for attribute–target pairings, with half the participants having altruistic paired with positive first and half with the opposite combination first. The self‐concept IAT always followed the attitude IAT. Volunteering/helping measures Three dependent variables concerning volunteering and helping were considered. A first indicator of volunteering consisted in a general measure of volunteering level (how much did you volunteer over the last year), rated on a 7‐point Likert scale from ‘not at all’ to ‘a very great extent’. We will refer to this measure as general volunteering. A second more specific measure of volunteering was obtained by asking seven questions related to the amount of time participants spent in volunteering‐related activities. These questions were adapted from ‘Measuring Volunteering: A Practical Toolkit’ (Independent Sector/United Nations Volunteers, 2001), which lists activities and contexts that are associated with volunteering. These various types of volunteering activities were distilled into seven questions that asked participants to quantify how many hours in the last month they spent on each particular activity. Every question began with the stem ‘In the last month, how many hours have you volunteered’ followed by the specific activities. These activities included benefiting community’s public spaces (e.g. cleaning graffiti, cleaning up rubbish), assisting needy individuals (e.g. elderly, disabled, poor), operating on behalf of a political party (e.g. writing letters, taking part in demonstrations), seeking social justice (e.g. writing letters, holding meetings), operating with educational institutions, helping with community entertainment events (e.g. musical or sporting events) and a final category including all other ways of volunteering not covered by the previous questions. We will call this measure monthly specific volunteering. The third indicator was the actual helping behaviour obtained in a spontaneous manner at the end of the experiment and expressed in amount Copyright
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of time participants were willing to volunteer for an alleged forthcoming study. We will refer to this measure as spontaneous helping. Hypotheses The three indicators of volunteering and helping are different in some crucial aspects and lend themselves to different hypotheses. The first measure (general volunteering) relies entirely on a generic self‐perception devoid of specific behavioural content—participants are asked to state how much they volunteered during the last year. This measure is not based on specific behavioural instances, and therefore, it is unlikely to be predicted by an implicit measure (see in the succeeding paragraph for a more detailed argument). In contrast, the third measure (spontaneous helping) corresponds to a specific spontaneous behaviour that is elicited incidentally in an experimental context. Although in principle the behaviour is controllable and hence may be the result of a lengthy deliberative decision‐making process, the specifics of the procedure are such that most people would decide whether to volunteer in a spontaneous manner on the spur of the momentary thoughts accessible in that specific situation. As we have briefly reviewed in the INTRODUCTION, the literature on automaticity is full of examples of similar behaviours that in principle can be controllable but that nonetheless are emitted as a consequence of quick associative processes. Based on the double dissociation model, theoretically we expect that explicit measures predict general volunteering but not spontaneous helping and vice versa for the implicit measures. The second indicator (monthly specific volunteering) is also self‐reported, but it does rely on recalling specific instances of volunteering behaviour in a relatively short time span (one month). Based on earlier work showing that an implicit measure significantly predicted a weekly recorded diary of specific instances of snacks and sweets consumption (Conner, Perugini, O’Gorman, Ayres, & Prestwich, 2007), we expected that the IATs would show a significant relationship with this variable. A similar hypothesis can be derived if we assume that this indicator is an example of operant behaviour (cf. Sheldon, King, Houser‐Marko, Osbaldiston, & Gunz, 2007). Operant behaviours are defined as spontaneous behavioural trends over time and have been shown to be best predicted by implicit motives (e.g. McClelland, Koestner, & Weinberger, 1989). They tend to be emitted in the absence of stringent situational concerns and are opposed to ‘respondent’ behaviours, which are enacted as a reaction to specific stimuli. As it has been argued elsewhere (Perugini & Leone, 2009), one could therefore expect significant links between implicit measures and the behavioural trends over time (that are at least partly captured by specific behavioural self‐reports), over and above the effects of explicit measures. However, we would expect also that explicit measures relate significantly with the second indicator, both for content and for method reasons. From a content perspective, self‐perceptions and explicit evaluations should be based on specific instances of behaviour confirming one’s self‐perception. In other words, if one thinks of oneself as a helpful person, say, this self‐perception should be based also on recalling specific episodes of being helpful Eur. J. Pers. (2011) DOI: 10.1002/per
Spontaneous helping towards other people. From a method point of view, the explicit measures and recalling how many hours of volunteering have been performed in the last month both rely on self‐ reported statements. Therefore, the method commonality may increase the variance shared. In sum, for this variable, we would expect an additive pattern in which both explicit and implicit measures add significantly to the prediction of the variable. Results and discussion In this as well as in the next two studies, the IAT scores were calculated considering the 60 test trials only and using the D‐6 algorithm (deletion of trials with latency below 400 ms and above 10 000 ms, replacement of errors with mean + 600 ms penalty) developed by Greenwald, Nosek, and Banaji (2003). Both implicit measures were reliable (attitude IAT: α = .87; self‐concept IAT: α = .78). The explicit attitude scale was also reliable (α = .79) as well as the other‐oriented empathy dimension (α = .76), whereas the helpfulness dimension showed a comparatively weaker reliability (α = .64). For general volunteering, the distribution of the variable was highly non‐normal (skewness = 3.18, kurtosis = 12.66), and therefore, a log transformation was performed to reduce skewness and kurtosis (−0.78 and −1.13, respectively) and the influence of extreme cases. Concerning the experimental behavioural measure of helping (spontaneous helping), on average, participants volunteered 11.44 minutes (SD = 17.27). However, the majority of the participants (58.8%) did not volunteer any time at all. Therefore, we dichotomized this variable (0 = not volunteering to help, 1 = volunteering to help) before further analyses. The correlation matrix between the variables and related descriptive statistics are reported in Table 1. Note that the IATs correlated with each other but not with the explicit measures, whereas the latter correlated significantly with each other. In terms of relationships with the criteria, the self‐concept IAT and other‐oriented empathy did not correlate significantly with any of the criteria. The attitude IAT correlated significantly with spontaneous helping and with monthly specific volunteering but not with general volunteering. In contrast, the explicit attitudinal measure correlated with general volunteering but did not correlate with spontaneous helping nor with monthly specific volunteering. Finally, the helpfulness scale correlated with general volunteering and with monthly specific volunteering but not with spontaneous helping. To further examine the issue of predictive validity, we ran a path analysis model with LISREL 8.7 (Jöreskog & Sörbom, 2004; Scientific Software International, Inc., Lincolnwood, IL, USA).1 We started the model by setting free all the parameters linking the measures (independent variables) with the indicators (dependent variables) that showed a significant correlation. We also set free the correlations among the independent and among the dependent variables. The fit of the model was very good 1 Given that spontaneous volunteering has been dichotomized, polyserial correlation coefficients concerning this variable were used. In line with the use of polyserial coefficients, the model was run starting from an asymptotic covariance matrix with a robust weighted least squares estimation.
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(χ215 ¼ 12:47; p ¼ :64, root mean square error of approximation = 0.00, Comparative Fit Index = 1.00), and consequently, there was no need to set further parameters free. The model with the standardized parameters is reported in Figure 1. The results confirm the double dissociation pattern for general volunteering and spontaneous helping: the former is predicted by helpfulness and the explicit attitudinal measure, whereas the latter is predicted by the attitude IAT altruistic and not vice versa. The double additive pattern is also confirmed for monthly specific volunteering, with helpfulness and attitude IAT altruistic both predicting significantly. Therefore, on the one hand, the results have shown that explicit personality or attitudinal measures can predict sustained forms of altruistic behaviour such as volunteering on a regular basis during a relatively long time. Moreover, they have shown that an implicit measure can also uniquely contribute to the prediction of such a specifically measured systematic behaviour. On the other hand, the results for spontaneous helping have confirmed the general idea that implicit measures can be unique predictors of behaviour that is decided upon in a relatively spontaneous and fast manner in specific incidental occasions. However, it is still unclear what kind of specific mechanisms and processes may underlie this finding. The next two studies are focused on investigating one such mechanism as put forward by the gatekeeper model (Perugini & Prestwich, 2007). We also refer the reader to the GENERAL DISCUSSION where we qualify the results of this study in an important way. Finally, it is also noteworthy that the implicit attitudinal measure performed better than the implicit self‐concept measure. However, caution should be taken in drawing more general implications from this latter result. A number of studies using implicit self‐concept measures have provided promising results (e.g. Asendorpf et al., 2002; Back, Schmukle, & Egloff, 2009; for a recent review, see Schnabel & Asendorpf, 2010), including studies concerning a related self‐concept such as morality (Perugini & Leone, 2009). Moreover, in this study, the implicit self‐concept always followed the implicit attitudinal measure, and therefore, we cannot rule out the possibility of an order effect on their validity. Future studies will be needed before more robust implications can be drawn. Nonetheless, given that in this specific study the implicit attitudinal measure of altruism performed remarkably better than the implicit self‐ concept measure, the subsequent studies only utilized attitudinal measures.
STUDY 2 The main aim of this and Study 3 was to test a basic prediction of the gatekeeper model that when a concept becomes highly accessible, individual differences in the valence of the concept predict subsequent behaviour. Based on the results of the first study, we employed implicit and explicit attitudinal measures of altruism. The test of the gatekeeper model was carried out by subliminally manipulating the accessibility of the altruistic concept and ascertaining whether under this condition it led to an increased predictive power of the implicit measure. This is an additional novel feature of this contribution. In the previous Eur. J. Pers. (2011) DOI: 10.1002/per
M. Perugini et al. Table 1. Study 1: Correlations between variables (n = 114) IAT altruistic attitude IAT altruistic attitude IAT altruistic self‐concept Explicit attitude helpful Other‐oriented empathy Helpfulness General volunteering Specific monthly volunteering Spontaneous helping M SD
1 .23* .01 −.13 −.10 .05 .21* .19* 0.91 0.30
IAT altruistic self‐concept
Explicit attitude helpful
Other‐ Specific oriented General monthly empathy Helpfulness volunteering volunteering
Spontaneous helping
1 .08 −.02 .14 .07 .07 .02 0.07 0.37
1 .23* .28** .21* −.11 .01 6.03 0.66
1 .43** .13 −.01 .03 3.52 0.38
1 .40** .31** .07 3.17 0.58
1 .55** .12 2.20 1.16
1 .09 9.75 16.30
1 11.44 17.27
Note: Specific monthly volunteering is log transformed; spontaneous volunteering is dichotomized (0 = no, 1 = yes); IAT, Implicit Association Test. *p.20). The joint analysis therefore confirmed the robustness of the main findings of the two studies.
GENERAL DISCUSSION This contribution had two main aims: first, to test different patterns of predictive validity for implicit and explicit measures and, second, to test the main tenet of the gatekeeper model. The results broadly supported the hypotheses. As far as the first aim is concerned, the results have shown that a double dissociation pattern emerged when considering two dependent variables at a different spectrum of the continuum deliberation/spontaneity, whereas an additive pattern was detected when considering a variable that lies somewhere in the middle of the continuum. These results confirm predictive patterns already identified in the literature in a domain that, to our knowledge, has not been subject to similar studies before. They therefore add to the literature showing the importance of implicit measures in predicting behaviour, especially under certain conditions (cf. Perugini et al., 2010; see also Friese, Hofmann, & Schmitt, 2008). We further elaborate on this issue in the succeeding paragraph. The most important aim of this contribution, however, was to test the gatekeeper model. The last two studies have clarified that subliminally priming the concept of altruism creates a condition under which the relative implicit measure best predicts spontaneous helping behaviour. As argued previously, we can interpret the results as determined by an activation of the associative structures—and therefore of individual differences in these structures as measured by the IAT—related to altruistic actions by the subliminally primed congruent concept. In other words, if perception is for doing (Dijksterhuis & Bargh, 2001), subliminally priming the Copyright
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concept altruistic has activated individual differences in implicit action tendencies towards acting altruistically. The results go beyond the original study of the gatekeeper model because in that study a supraliminal priming procedure was used (Perugini & Prestwich, 2007). The use of a subliminal priming procedure in this contribution provides a stronger and more stringent test of the key predictions of the gatekeeper model. The results of the last two studies not only identify a condition under which implicit measures are more likely to predict behaviour but also suggest that individual differences in implicit measures moderate the influence of priming. In fact, the differential predictive validity of the IAT between priming and control conditions is equivalent to an experimental test of a moderation effect. It is noteworthy that this moderation effect was detected in the absence of a main effect of the priming manipulation as such, further reinforcing the idea that the role of individual differences in the relevant construct is a key theoretical mechanism in the automatic chain from perception to action. These results have a series of implications, some of which we briefly develop in the succeeding paragraph. First, it is important to stress that although this specific test of the gatekeeper model has been carried out considering implicit attitudes, the general logic also applies to implicit self‐concepts. Indeed, other studies have already shown this to be the case (e.g. Richetin et al., 2010), and we would predict that similar results can be obtained with other implicit self‐concept measures. Second, it remains to be understood whether and under what conditions the subtle effects of a priming manipulation on behaviour can be moderated by explicit rather than implicit measures (or by both). Although the results of this study would suggest that individual differences in quick associative processes matter most, other studies reviewed previously have instead shown that explicit personality self‐concepts can also moderate priming effects. Systematic studies on this specific issue would advance knowledge and understanding of the functioning and activation of implicit versus explicit personality dimensions. Third, this contribution can be also read from the perspective of how specific, actual behaviour can be predicted by broad dimensions, an issue that is becoming an important one in personality research (Furr, 2009). An astute reader will have noticed that there is an apparent inconsistency between the results of the first study, where the IAT predicted spontaneous helping behaviour without the presence of a priming manipulation, and the results of the subsequent two studies, where the IAT did predict behaviour under priming but not under control conditions.3 We believe that this apparent inconsistency is due to subtle but important differences among the spontaneous helping behaviours. Indeed, we intentionally modified the behavioural measure used in the first study because it did not work ideally, given that most participants did not volunteer any time at all. The behaviour used in the second study and in the third study was modified to be more specific and slightly more attractive (evaluation of video clips vs a 3
We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers and the editor for raising this issue.
Eur. J. Pers. (2011) DOI: 10.1002/per
M. Perugini et al. generic perception experiment). Moreover, an additional important difference between the two behavioural measures lies in the potential for an identification process leading to empathy. In the first study, the poster advertising the fictitious experiment mirrored the typical posters attached in an English university by students seeking participants for their dissertations, and the person requesting for help was a fictitious student. In the second study and in the third study instead, the slip advertising the experiment was written by a fictitious experimenter, allegedly a colleague of the experimenter himself. Therefore, the two behavioural measures differed also in terms of their potential for identification between the help donor and the help recipient. This is a basic mechanism in leading to empathy and consequently to helping behaviour, as has been shown in several experimental studies by Batson and colleagues (for reviews, see Batson, 1998; Batson & Oleson, 1991). It is therefore plausible that the lower sensitivity and attractiveness of the first behavioural measure (i.e. helping was more difficult in the sense that less people helped and devoted less time) was, however, paired with a greater likelihood of helping occurring for those people who empathized more with their fellow student. Those people might have a chronically greater activation of the helping construct and therefore be more prone to be guided by their implicit altruistic attitude in volunteering to help, somehow functionally similar to the experimental conditions of Studies 2 and 3 although of course at a dispositional rather than situational level. If this reasoning is correct, it should follow that the attitude IAT altruistic should predict more for people with greater empathy, as measured by the other‐oriented empathy scale of the PPB. To test this supposition, we ran a logistic regression with the dichotomized spontaneous helping as dependent variable and the attitude IAT altruistic, the other‐ oriented empathy scale and their interaction as predictors. The predictors explained altogether 10% of variance (Nagelkerke R2), but although neither the attitude IAT altruistic (OR = 1.45; p = .109) nor the other‐oriented empathy scale (OR = 1.07; p = .745) were significant predictors, the interaction term showed a significant effect (OR = 1.68; p = .048). To appreciate its implications in a way that is easily comparable with the results of Studies 2 and 3, we dichotomized the other‐oriented empathy scale and calculated the correlation between the attitude IAT altruistic and the spontaneous helping behaviour separately for high and low scorers in the empathy scale. The results show that although for those low in empathy the correlation is not significant (r = −.06, p = .650), it is in contrast highly significant for those high in empathy (r = .37, p = .004). We also ran a parallel logistic regression with explicit attitudes replacing the IAT. Neither the main predictors nor the interaction term was significant (all p’s >.51). This result therefore importantly qualifies the earlier results presented for the first study: as in Studies 2 and 3 the IAT predicts helping behaviour only when the concept is subliminally primed, in Study 1, the IAT predicts helping behaviour only for people with relatively high levels of dispositional empathy. Note also that in all cases, the moderation effect was present for implicit but not for explicit measures. This Copyright
© 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
result is important for at least two reasons. First, it suggests that theoretically meaningful dispositional characteristics may play a functionally similar role as a priming manipulation. We can speculate in fact that people with greater dispositional empathy have a chronically higher accessibility of the helpfulness construct and consequently are more likely to act in accordance with their implicit altruistic attitude. Future studies could test directly this suggestion. Second, this result identifies a new moderator of the predictive validity of implicit measures. Moreover, the identified moderator is arguably a theoretically key construct, and therefore, it sheds light also on the automatic associative processes that may lead to helping behaviour. To sum up, at a more fine‐grained analysis, the results of the three studies are not inconsistent, but they rather tell a similar story. We should also acknowledge some limitations of this contribution.4 First, the explicit measures differed in a number of ways from the IATs, and therefore, one cannot exclude that minor variations in the material may partly account for their differential validity. We preferred to use the most commonly used measures in each tradition (semantic differentials for attitudes, items for personality traits) rather than to seek for a close overlap at the procedural level that could have been obtained by using explicit measures containing exactly the same stimuli (adjectives) as for the IATs. We believe that our choice was justified but we acknowledge that it may potentially add a source of variance in the interpretation of the results. Second, one could argue that strictly speaking, we did not measure actual behaviours but behavioural intentions. Although we acknowledge that perhaps they were not helping behaviours in its strictest sense, they were also more than vague behavioural intentions given that they required to provide one’s email address and to make a specific commitment to perform a specific action within the near future. It is reasonable to expect that when people signed up, they were aware that they were going to be contacted and would have eventually done what they did commit to. After all, committing to volunteer for an unpaid experiment for a specific amount of time is in itself a form of helpful action rather than a hypothetical self‐reported intention. Therefore, although one could perhaps argue that they were not helping behaviours in the strictest sense, we think that, at very least, they were good and valid proxies. A final consideration concerns the logic underlying this contribution. We have adopted an interactionist perspective to personality research in which the focus is on identifying situational and personal determinants of behaviour (Zettler & Hilbig, 2010) with particular emphasis on their dynamic interplay (Reynolds et al., 2010), an issue that has been fiercely debated from the perspective of social identity (e.g. Guimond, Chatard, & Kang, 2010) versus personality traits (e.g. Brooks, Buhrmester, & Swann, 2010; Donnellan & Robins, 2010). The importance of a dynamic interactionist perspective has been highlighted (Schmitt & Baumert, 2010), with emphasis on understanding the specific processes through which stable individual differences such as personality traits can influence cognitive processes and ultimately behaviours in conjunction with specific situational 4
We would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for raising the issues.
Eur. J. Pers. (2011) DOI: 10.1002/per
Spontaneous helping conditions (e.g. when witnessing injustice, people high in justice sensitivity cognitively process the available information in a trait‐congruent way leading to specific emotional reactions and consequent behaviours; see Baumert, Gollwitzer, Staubach, & Schmitt, in press). A layer of novelty added by this contribution is the focus on the role played by automatic processes in the dynamic interplay between situational and personal determinants of behaviour. In summary, this contribution has shown the important role of implicit measures of individual differences in predicting behaviours as well as in providing support for the gatekeeper model. Future contributions may fruitfully focus on implicit self‐concepts as well as on advancing the theoretical understanding of the functioning and activation of stable individual differences such as personality self‐ concepts and traits in affecting behaviour under conditions in which the prevailing cognitive processes are deemed to be associative and implicit.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This work was funded by the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) grant no. R000230104. The authors want to thank Juliette Richetin for comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript.
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