The verb–self link: An implicit association test study

Abstract

Agency is defined as the ability to assign and pursue goals. Given people’s focus on achieving their own goals, agency has been found to be strongly linked to the self. In two studies (N = 168), we examined whether this self–agency link is visible from a linguistic perspective. As the preferred grammatical category to convey agency is verbs, we hypothesize that, in the Implicit Association Test (IAT), verbs (vs. nouns) would be associated more strongly with the self (vs. others). Our results confirmed this hypothesis. Participants exhibited particularly fast responses when reading self-related stimuli (e.g., “me” or “my”) and verb stimuli (e.g., “deflect” or “contemplate”) both necessitated pressing an identical rather than different response keys in the IAT (d =.25). The finding connects two streams of literature—on the link between agency and verbs and on the link between self and agency—suggesting a triad between self, agency, and verbs. We argue that this verb–self link (1) opens up new perspectives for understanding linguistic expressions of agency and (2) expands our understanding of how word choice impacts socio-cognitive processing.