Self-awareness and cognitive style: Relationships among adaption-innovation, self-monitoring, and self-consciousness

Adaption-innovation is a construct of preferred problem-solving style; adaptors work best within clear guidelines and prefer to “do things better”, whereas innovators bridle at structure and prefer to “do things differently”. Adaption-innovation bears considerable putative similarity to self-monitoring and self-consciousness. In this study the relationships among these constructs were explored using the responses of 55 undergraduate students (48 females, 7 males) on the Kirton Adaption-Innovation Inventory (KAI; Kirton, 1976), the Self-Monitoring Scale (Snyder & Gangestad, 1986) and the Self-Consciousness Scale (Fenigstein, Scheier, & Buss, 1975). Higher adaption-innovation scores were significantly and positively associated with higher self-monitoring scores and significantly and negatively associated with social anxiety scores. In addition, multiple regression analyses indicated that the facets of self-consciousness as well as self-monitoring significantly predicted adaption-innovation. The implications of examining cognitive style in relation to interpersonal attributes are discussed.