Liking as far as you like yourself: Exploring the Self-Referencing effect across multiple intersecting regularities and its relationship with self-esteem

Classic instances of evaluative learning require the spatio-temporal contingency between source and target stimuli. However, people can learn to like stimuli in a more indirect fashion. Moreover, many of our preferences are self-referential: we tend to like the objects that are related to ourselves. For instance, it is demonstrated that performing the Self-Referencing task, a categorization task based on intersecting regularities between the self and a target stimulus, results in a transfer of positivity from the self to the target. Unexplored so far is the extent to which intersecting regularities can be exploited to form even less direct connections between the self and the target, which ultimately results in a preference for the latter. In two experiments, we tested the indirect SR effect. To this aim, we set up a two-step learning procedure in which, after completion of the SR task, participants underwent an additional task, where target stimuli categorized in the SR shared a behavioral response with novel targets. Experiment 1 (N=241) showed significant direct and indirect SR effects, both implicitly and explicitly, irrespectively of the type of targeted stimuli (i.e., groups or brands). Experiment 2 (N=174) replicated such findings and showed that explicit, but not implicit, self-esteem moderated the SR effect. Although at a descriptive level the moderating role of explicit self-esteem showed stronger on the indirect SR effect, no statistical evidence was found to support a differential impact on either direct or indirect SR. We discuss the power of IR to transfer self-positivity indirectly across stimuli, the role of self-esteem, and the theoretical implications of our findings.