Demographic and contextual factors impact a three-tier hierarchy of self-potency among community adults and inmates

Abstract Humans have three major and meaningful aspects of identity: individual, relational and collective self. These three aspects establish a pancultural motivational hierarchy with individual self being most important. Motivational self-hierarchy is a fundamental pattern of the human self but it appears that prior studies have primarily relied on students as subjects. The first aim of the current work was to validate the above reports and to analyze the potential impact of demographic factors on the self-hierarchy. The second aim was to verify whether the life context (imprisonment) of the participant impacts the self-hierarchy. We conducted two studies involving participants from different groups (individuals from the community: N = 406, 187 women; and inmates: N = 123, 61 women). Our results shed new light on the motivational self-hierarchy, as the importance of the individual self did not appear to differ significantly from the relational self. However, demographic characteristics such as age, particularly, and place of living impacted the importance of selves and to an extent the hierarchy.