Developing an integrative social-cognitive strategy for personality assessment at the level of the individual: An illustration with regular cigarette smokers

Basic advances in social cognition have not fully translated into similar advances for personality assessment. In this study, we evaluated whether an integrated social cognitive approach to personality assessment (i.e., one that employs an idiographic assessment of a multi-faceted self-system, priming procedures, and reaction time tasks) could be applied to assess a social cognitive personality system at the individual level in a particularly challenging population: cigarette smokers. This integrative approach was necessary to detect the idiosyncratic content and contextualized structure of the three self-schemas (smoker self-schema, abstainer ideal possible self, abstainer ought possible self) that composed this social cognitive personality system. Priming different self-structures enhanced reaction times to contextually bound self-referent information. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for social cognitive theories of personality and personality assessment.