SELF-DISTINCTIVE TRAITS AS PERSONAL IDENTITY ATTRIBUTES

The data show that self-related biases in the perception of other people's features (such as attributing to others one's own negative traits rather than the positive ones, or less underestimation of one's own trait similarity to an attractive than to a neutral person) manifest themselves exclusively for one category of self-trait: only those perceived as the most distinctive for the self. This article presents a review of the empirical data leading to the following generalization: self-traits perceived by a subject as clearly differentiating him/herself from others, compared with all other self-traits, are governed by different rules of social information processing. The author postulates that personal identity can be defined as a subsystem of the self-knowledge system consisting of attributes perceived by a subject as the most characteristic, and at the same time the most specific (distinctive), of the self.