People's Self-views Research Articles

Reasserting the Self: Blocking Self-verifying Behavior Triggers Compensatory Self-verification

Previous research has demonstrated that when people receive self-discrepant feedback from their interaction partners, they respond by engaging in compensatory self-verification. We sought to extend this work by determining if merely preventing people from behaving in a self-verifying manner would trigger compensatory self-verification. Consistent with this possibility, when deprived of the opportunity to demonstrate their assertiveness, participants who perceived themselves as assertive subsequently compensated by displaying increased assertiveness in a subsequent interaction. In addition, self-perceived unassertive participants reported negative affect when forced to act in an assertive manner. Evidence that these effects were predicted by a measure of identity but not a measure of behavioral propensity diminished the plausibility of rival accounts such as ego depletion. We conclude that compensatory self-verification emerges even when people's self-views are indirectly challenged by depriving them of the opportunity to self-verify.

Harnessing Social Comparisons: When and How Upward Comparisons Influence Goal Pursuit

Upward social comparisons have been shown to impact people's self-views, their emotional states, and their behaviors. The present research suggests that such comparisons may also influence the goals that people pursue and the success with which they pursue them. Inspired by goal systems theory, the present research examines how upward social comparisons influence goal commitment in two ways: through hierarchical shifts toward global goals and through lateral shifts in goal commitment away from subgoals in threatening domains. We demonstrate that people actively disengage from domain-specific subgoals (e.g., verbal abilities) and increase commitment to a related superordinate goal (e.g., succeeding in school) after they have been exposed to an upward comparison that threatens their self-evaluations.

Is the allure of self-esteem a mirage after all?

Comments on the original article "Do people's self-views matter? Self-concept and self-esteem in everyday life," by W. B. Swann, Jr., C. Chang-Schneider, and K. L. McClarty. Swann et al argued that people's self-views, and their global self-esteem in particular, yield a suite of behavioral effects that are beneficial to the individual and to society at large. The Swann et al article is the latest link in a debate on the causal utility of self-esteem. Specifically, the article is a reply to a report published by the American Psychological Society Task Force on Self-Esteem (Baumeister, Campbell, Krueger, & Vohs, 2003). As members of that task force, the current authors wish to express their broad agreement with Swann et al. At the same time, in the comment presented here, they clarify pockets of disagreement.

Do people's self-views matter? Self-concept and self-esteem in everyday life.

Recent scholars have dismissed the utility of self-esteem as well as programs designed to improve it. The authors challenge these contentions on conceptual, methodological, and empirical grounds. They begin by proposing that the scope of recent analyses has been overly narrow and should be broadened to include specific as well as global self-views. Using this conceptualization, the authors place recent critiques in historical context, recalling that similarly skeptical commentaries on global attitudes and traits inspired theorizing and empirical research that subsequently restored faith in the value of both constructs. Specifically, they point to 3 strategies for attaining more optimistic assessments of the predictive validity of self-views: recognizing the utility of incorporating additional variables in predictive schemes, matching the specificity of predictors and criteria, and using theoretically informed standards for evaluating predictor- criterion relationships. The authors conclude that self-views do matter and that it is worthwhile and important to develop and implement theoretically informed programs to improve them.

Flawed Self-Assessment: Implications for Health, Education, and the Workplace.

Research from numerous corners of psychological inquiry suggests that self-assessments of skill and character are often flawed in substantive and systematic ways. We review empirical findings on the imperfect nature of self-assessment and discuss implications for three real-world domains: health, education, and the workplace. In general, people's self-views hold only a tenuous to modest relationship with their actual behavior and performance. The correlation between self-ratings of skill and actual performance in many domains is moderate to meager-indeed, at times, other people's predictions of a person's outcomes prove more accurate than that person's self-predictions. In addition, people overrate themselves. On average, people say that they are "above average" in skill (a conclusion that defies statistical possibility), overestimate the likelihood that they will engage in desirable behaviors and achieve favorable outcomes, furnish overly optimistic estimates of when they will complete future projects, and reach judgments with too much confidence. Several psychological processes conspire to produce flawed self-assessments. Research focusing on health echoes these findings. People are unrealistically optimistic about their own health risks compared with those of other people. They also overestimate how distinctive their opinions and preferences (e.g., discomfort with alcohol) are among their peers-a misperception that can have a deleterious impact on their health. Unable to anticipate how they would respond to emotion-laden situations, they mispredict the preferences of patients when asked to step in and make treatment decisions for them. Guided by mistaken but seemingly plausible theories of health and disease, people misdiagnose themselves-a phenomenon that can have severe consequences for their health and longevity. Similarly, research in education finds that students' assessments of their performance tend to agree only moderately with those of their teachers and mentors. Students seem largely unable to assess how well or poorly they have comprehended material they have just read. They also tend to be overconfident in newly learned skills, at times because the common educational practice of massed training appears to promote rapid acquisition of skill-as well as self-confidence-but not necessarily the retention of skill. Several interventions, however, can be introduced to prompt students to evaluate their skill and learning more accurately. In the workplace, flawed self-assessments arise all the way up the corporate ladder. Employees tend to overestimate their skill, making it difficult to give meaningful feedback. CEOs also display overconfidence in their judgments, particularly when stepping into new markets or novel projects-for example, proposing acquisitions that hurt, rather then help, the price of their company's stock. We discuss several interventions aimed at circumventing the consequences of such flawed assessments; these include training people to routinely make cognitive repairs correcting for biased self-assessments and requiring people to justify their decisions in front of their peers. The act of self-assessment is an intrinsically difficult task, and we enumerate several obstacles that prevent people from reaching truthful self-impressions. We also propose that researchers and practitioners should recognize self-assessment as a coherent and unified area of study spanning many subdisciplines of psychology and beyond. Finally, we suggest that policymakers and other people who makes real-world assessments should be wary of self-assessments of skill, expertise, and knowledge, and should consider ways of repairing self-assessments that may be flawed.

Finding Value in Diversity: Verification of Personal and Social Self-Views in Diverse Groups

We propose a model of group processes that accords a key role to the verification of people's self-views (thoughts and feelings about the self). This approach partially incorporates past work on self-categorization (under the rubric of verification of social self-views) and introduces a new set of processes (the verification of personal self-views) to the groups literature. Conceptual analysis and recent empirical evidence suggest the self-verification framework offers a novel perspective on finding value in diversity.

On confidence and consequence: The certainty and importance of self-knowledge.

Belief certainty and belief importance represent 2 relatively independent forms of investment in the self-concept. Three studies suggested that whereas certainty is associated with epistemic (i.e., rational or informational) factors, importance is more closely associated with emotive (i.e., emotional and motivational) factors. A 4th study explored the implications of certainty and importance for the temporal stability of people's self-views and revealed that whereas belief certainty was associated with the stability of both positive and negative beliefs, belief importance was associated with the stability of positive beliefs only. The implications of belief investment for the verification-enhancement debate and for the structure and measurement of the self-concept are discussed.