No Space for Others? On the Increase of Students Self-Focus When Prodded to Think About Many Others
Journal of Language and Social Psychology
Published online on February 09, 2016
Abstract
In the present experiment, participants read about the presence of many versus few others in typical student-life situations. They subsequently wrote an essay about their perspectives on learning in groups. Using the program Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count to analyze these essays signified that participants who read prompts that involved many (vs. few) other students used more first-person singular pronouns and fewer words related to others. We interpret this increase in self-focus as a consequence of induced social crowding.