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SELF-NOVELTY MANIPULATIONS Many self-awareness experiments have induced self-focus by making people feel distinctive. When some aspect of the self sticks out, people will focus attention on the self. The most unusual manipulation was by Mayer, Duval, Holtz, and Bowman (1985, PSPB). They calculated the participant's astrological diagram and said that the overall pattern was quite rare or very common. This manipulation affected self-awareness (measured by the Stroop task) and attributions of personal responsibility. A practical self-novelty manipulation (Silvia & Eichstaedt, 2004) asks people to write about ways in which they differ from their friends, from their family, and from other students at their school. People in control conditions write about self-irrelevant topics or do not do any writing. The exact questions can be modified for non-student populations. A copy of the self-novelty writing task can be downloaded here. People who completed this manipulation showed higher self-focus on different measures (sentence-completion tasks, self-report scales, and an implicit measure). This manipulation also replicates conventional self-awareness manipulations. Unlike mirrors and video cameras, this manipulation can be used in groups or over the Internet. This manipulation is particularly helpful when an experiment needs to induce self-awareness without drawing attention to the person's face. Validation research:
Some papers that used this manipulation:
P. Silvia,
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