IJDS 1.1 Stemplewska-Zakowicz Walecka Gabinska Many Selves

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Volume 1 Number 1 Spring 2006

As Many Selves As Interpersonal Relations (Or Maybe Even More)
Katarzyna Stemplewska-Zakowicz, Justyna Walecka, and Anna Gabinska
Warsaw School of Social Psychology pp. 71-94

ABSTRACT. The effects of an "internal audience" (Zajonc, 1960; Baldwin et al., 1990) and "shared reality" (Hardin and Higgins, 1996) seem to indicate a dialogical nature of cognition and modular structure of the mind, which can be fully described by discursive conceptions, including the theory of the Dialogical Self (Hermans, 1999). This article sets out to describe an empirical attempt to verify one of the basic theses of the theory of the Dialogical Self, according to which each I-position, creates its own Me, being the hero of a specific self-narrative. The experiment using a simplified version of the Baldwin and Holmes' (1987) procedure showed that life stories created by different I-positions do indeed differ in a range of content-related and formal characteristics, which is in agreement with the theory of the Dialogical Self. Given the results, one may also evaluate various methods of positioning as experimental procedures that differ in their effectiveness.

Keywords: positioning, dialogical self, shared reality, self-narrative

As Many Selves As Interpersonal Relations (Or Maybe Even More) Katarzyna Stemplewska-Zakowicz, Justyna Walecka, and Anna Gabinska Warsaw School of Social Psychology	pp. 71-94

ABSTRACT. The effects of an "internal audience" (Zajonc, 1960; Baldwin et al., 1990) and "shared reality" (Hardin and Higgins, 1996) seem to indicate a dialogical nature of cognition and modular structure of the mind, which can be fully described by discursive conceptions, including the theory of the Dialogical Self (Hermans, 1999). This article sets out to describe an empirical attempt to verify one of the basic theses of the theory of the Dialogical Self, according to which each I-position, creates its own Me, being the hero of a specific self-narrative. The experiment using a simplified version of the Baldwin and Holmes' (1987) procedure showed that life stories created by different I-positions do indeed differ in a range of content-related and formal characteristics, which is in agreement with the theory of the Dialogical Self. Given the results, one may also evaluate various methods of positioning as experimental procedures that differ in their effectiveness.

Keywords: positioning, dialogical self, shared reality, self-narrative