Increasing self–other integration through divergent thinking

Lorenza S. Colzato 0 Wery P. M. van den Wildenberg 0 Bernhard Hommel 0 0 W. P. M. van den Wildenberg Amsterdam Center for the Study of Adaptive Control in Brain and Behaviour (Acacia) Psychology Department, University of Amsterdam , Amsterdam , The Netherlands 1 ) Department of Psychology, Cognitive Psychology Unit, Leiden University , Wassenaarseweg 52, 2333 AK Leiden , The Netherlands Increasing evidence suggests that people may cognitively represent themselves and others just like any other, nonsocial event. Here, we provide evidence that the degree of self-other integration (as reflected by the joint Simon effect; JSE) is systematically affected by the control characteristics of temporally overlapping but unrelated and nonsocial creativity tasks. In particular, the JSE was found to be larger in the context of a divergent-thinking task (alternate uses task) than in the context of a convergent-thinking task (remote association task). This suggests that self-other integration and action corepresentation are controlled by domain-general cognitivecontrol parameters that regulate the integrativeness (strong vs. weak top-down control and a resulting narrow vs. broad attentional focus) of information processing irrespective of its social implications. - Increasing evidence suggests that the degree to which people construe their self as independent from their social environment can vary. Evidence for interindividual variability comes from intercultural studies, which have revealed that collectivistic cultures tend to lead to strong interdependence, while individualistic cultures are likely to induce strong independence of self and other (for an overview, see Triandis, 1989). This flexibility of self-construal, the way people construe their perceived self, demonstrates that the concrete implementation and configuration of a self-concept is not a mere by-product of being a member of a social group but, rather, a construction that reflects cultural biases and constraints. Evidence for intraindividual variability comes from studies showing that the degree of selfother inclusion is sensitive to situational factors. For instance, Khnen and Oyserman (2002) had participants circle all relational pronouns in a text (such as we, our, or us) or all pronouns referring to the self as independent from others (such as I, my, or me) to induce a context-dependent and a context-dependent self-focus, respectively. As indicated by the performance profiles in two attentional tasks carried out after the induction, the contextdependent focus led to a broader, more global attentional focus than did the context-independent focus. Using the same induction technique, Colzato, de Bruijn, and Hommel (2012) showed that inducing a context-dependent self-focus increases the size of the joint Simon effect (Sebanz, Knoblich, & Prinz, 2003)an effect that, as we will discuss below, reflects the degree to which people relate their own action to others. Taken together, these observations suggest that the selfconcept is a rather volatile, dynamic construction that adapts to the situation at hand. In particular, whether an individual integrates or discriminates between self and other does not reflect a trait, or an overlearned cultural bias, that he or she may or may not have but, rather, a cognitive state that can vary. As was suggested by Hommel, Colzato, and van den Wildenberg (2009), the cognitive system may represent an individual in the same way as any other event (Hommel, Msseler, Aschersleben & Prinz, 2001)that is, as an integrated network of codes representing the individuals features: how he/she is looking, acting, makes one feel, and so forth. If so, there would be no principled difference between representing oneself and representing another person, except that some sensory channels (those underlying interoception in particular) would be more informative about the self, while others are often more informative about the other (e.g., vision). Accordingly, there would be no reason to assume that the process of selfother integration or discrimination is any different from the process of integrating or discriminating between two objects or other kinds of events. Hence, if we would find a way to make individuals more integrative or more discriminative in general (i.e., even in a manner that is unrelated to self-construal), we should be able to show that this also affects selfother integration and discrimination. In the present study, we tried to induce integrative and exclusive cognitive-control states by means of task priming. Cognitive-control states are notorious for being robust and inert (Allport, Styles, & Hsieh, 1994; Meiran, Hommel, Bibi, & Lev, 2002; Memelink & Hommel, 2006), so that they often tend to outlive the task context they were established for. Accordingly, they often bias subsequent control states in systematic ways. For instance, Memelink and Hommel had participants work through a two-dimensional Simon task, in which stimulus and response could correspond or not correspond on the vertical or the horizontal dimension. The Simon task was interleaved with another task, in which participants were to attend to either the vertical or the horizontal location of a stimulus. It turned out that the vertical Simon effect was more pronounced if the interleaved task called for the processing of the vertical, rather than the horizontal, location, while the opposite was the case for the horizontal Simon effect. This is a clear demonstration that the control parameters for one task intruded into a temporally proximate but logically unrelated other task and systematically biased processing therein. In other words, the parameters of overlapping tasks prime each other. Hommel, Akbari Chermahini, van den Wildenberg, and Colzato (2012) made use of this cross-task priming effect to induce more integrative or more exclusive cognitive-control states. They had participants perform particular cognitive tasks interleaved with, or right after having carried out, a prime task that required either convergent thinking (Mednick, 1962) or divergent thinking (Guilford, 1967). As was predicted, performance in tasks calling for a strong degree of top-down control, such as the Navon globallocal task, the Stroop task, and the Simon task, benefited more from a convergent-thinking prime. In contrast, tasks that suffer from too much top-down control, like the attentional blink task, benefited more from a divergent-thinking prime. This pattern suggests that convergent-thinking tasks induce a more focused, exclusive control mode that zooms in on the relevant information at the cost of less relevant information, whereas divergent-thinking tasks induce a less focused, more integrative control mode that reduces top-down control (Hommel, 2012). Along the same lines, Fischer and Hommel (2012) had participants perform two tasks concurrently after having carried out a convergent-thinking or divergent-thinking prime task. As was e (...truncated)