Psychological theories posit that we frequently switch social identities, yet little is known about the effectiveness of such switches. Our research aims to address this gap in knowledge by determining whether – and at what level of integration into the self-concept – a social identity switch impairs the activation of the currently active identity (“identity activation cost”). Based on the task-switching paradigm used to investigate task-set control, we prompted social identity switches and measured identity salience in a laboratory study using sequences of identity-related Implicit Association Tests (IATs). Pilot 1 (N = 24) and Study 1 (N = 64) used within-subjects designs with participants completing several social identity switches. The IAT congruency effect was no less robust after identity switches compared to identity repetitions, suggesting that social identity switches were highly effective. Study 2 (N = 48) addressed potential differences for switches between identities at different levels of integration into the self. We investigated whether switches between established identities are more effective than switches from a novel to an established identity. While response times showed the predicted trend towards a smaller IAT congruency effect after switching from a novel identity, we found a trend towards the opposite pattern for error rates. The registered study (N = 144) assessed these conflicting results with sufficient power and found no significant difference in the effectiveness of switching from novel as compared to established identities. An effect of cross-categorisation in the registered study was likely due to the requirement to learn individual stimuli.

心理学理论假设我们经常转换社会身份，但对这种转换的有效性知之甚少。我们的研究旨在通过确定社会身份转换是否以及在何种程度上融入自我概念会损害当前活跃身份的激活（“身份激活成本”）来解决这一知识差距。基于用于研究任务集控制的任务切换范式，我们在实验室研究中使用身份相关的隐式关联测试 (IAT) 序列促进了社会身份切换并测量了身份显着性。试点 1 ( N  = 24) 和研究 1 ( N = 64）使用受试者内部设计，参与者完成了几次社会身份转换。与身份重复相比，身份转换后的 IAT 一致性效应同样稳健，这表明社会身份转换非常有效。研究 2 ( N  = 48) 解决了在不同程度的自我整合身份之间转换的潜在差异。我们调查了既定身份之间的转换是否比从小说到既定身份的转换更有效。虽然响应时间显示出从新身份转换后 IAT 一致性效应较小的预测趋势，但我们发现错误率呈现相反模式的趋势。注册研究（N = 144) 以足够的能力评估了这些相互矛盾的结果，发现与既定身份相比，从小说转换的有效性没有显着差异。注册研究中交叉分类的影响可能是由于需要学习个体刺激。