Reprezentarea mintală a self-ului și a altora: Efectul Muhammad Ali în România. Particularități ale tranziției Self and other Representation: Muhammad Ali Effect in Romania. The peculiarity of Transition Section Miscelanea

Abstract

The Muhammad Ali Effect has been tested on a number of 412 students from 10 social and engineering sciences colleges from Bucharest. The existence of this effect has been highlighted in the mental representation of the self and of others in the case of the Romanian students, a findings that supports the hypothesis that there is a general tendency of perceiving ourselves as being more honest, not more sensible than others. As a peculiarity under the conditions of the transition to the market economy, honesty is regarded as less desirable than intelligence. Given these findings, in contradiction with the hypothesis according to which the effects is mediated by desirability, we suggest that, one should add to the factors that explain the Muhammad Ali Effect (desirability, controllability, the ability to be proven), also the factors concerning information processing depending on the emotionality and the private or public feature of the aspects of the self. During the transition period, the Romanian students seem to have an intermediate self, very close to the Western self.