Who owns these objects? - Impact of social and personal conditions on self-prioritisation

Abstract

A relatively new development concerning literature pertaining to the concept of self-bias has highlighted that humans tend to self-prioritise when completing tasks based on perceptual judgements (the self-prioritisation effect). Since then, further exploration into the role that other tasks can have on this effect have been demonstrated, including the idea that object-ownership tasks show the same effects (Golubickis et al., 2018). As recent focus has been on the association between this effect and the task used, it means that there has been little exploration into the possible role that other variables have on predicting levels of self-prioritisation. Based on this, the current study aimed to investigate the influence of social/ personal conditions on self-prioritisation. An object-ownership task was used as a measure to compare levels of self-prioritisation against questionnaire scores assessing the current levels of four self-relevant conditions: self-monitoring, narcissism, anxiety, and depression. Linear regression analysis found that, out of all the conditions, only self-monitoring was able to significantly predict levels of self-prioritisation. These results suggest that certain traits can have an influence on the self-prioritisation effect, but the traits that do have an influence are more complicated to predict than just being self-relevant in nature.