Self Verification, Self Assessment, and Self Esteem

Self-Verification

• Self-verification is the motivation to confirm what we already know about ourselves.

• Topics to be covered include:

  • Self-verification theory tenets
  • Empirical evidence
  • Debates surrounding self-verification
    • Alternative explanations for research
    • Universality
    • Adaptive or maladaptive nature

• According to Daisy Jones from Daisy Jones and the Six, "Everybody wants somebody to hold up the right mirror."

Self-Verification Theory (William Swan)

• William Swan's research indicates that we don't always want to self-enhance.

• When trying to self-verify in important domains:

  • We want or prefer feedback that is congruent or consistent with our self-concept.
    • If we think we're skilled, we seek positive feedback.
    • If we think we're unskilled, we seek negative feedback to confirm that.

• We want other people to see us the way we see ourselves.

Problem: Disentangling Self-Enhancement and Self-Verification

• How do we know when people seek positive information for self-enhancement vs. self-verification?
• Swan's Insight:
  • Focus on people with negative self-views.
  • If they seek negative information, that supports self-verification theory.

Why Self-Verify?

• We like to maintain consistency and will sometimes strive to have our sense of self confirmed rather than enhanced.
• Inconsistencies make people feel uncomfortable.
• A student mentioned that receiving feedback inconsistent with one's own view can lead to cognitive dissonance.
  • Example: Knowing you're not good at sports but receiving feedback that you are would be inconsistent.
• Having stable self-perceptions can satisfy our needs for prediction and control
  • Helps maintain a coherent sense of self

Maintaining Consistency

• Sometimes people call that coherent sense of self "self-concept clarity"
• Sometimes people call that a sense of "self unity"
• Looking to our past behaviors and attitudes to guide present attitudes and/or behaviors
• Example: Not being a great cook, so needing friends to agree that you aren't instead of boosting you up

Source of Self-Verification Motive

• Self-verifying information is more easily digested and processed.
• Ease or fluency of processing information leads to positive affect.
  • Self-enhancement: Feeling good about our self-perception.
  • Self-verification: Feeling good because we've processed information easily, even if negative.

Strategies for Self-Verification

• People can satisfy their self-verification needs by structuring social environments to confirm their needs.
  1. Surround ourselves with partners who will confirm or self-verify our self-perceptions (partners*).
  2. Communicate our self-perceptions/views to others by displaying identity cues.
     • Visible signs/symbols of who we are (physical appearance, clothes, hairstyle, etc.).
  3. We can reinterpret information in such a way that it self-confirms our views so that we can feel good.
     • Has to do with biased attention and recall biases in terms of eliciting information, recalling information and accepting information or feedback about the self.

Empirical Evidence for Self-Verification Strategies

• Swan recruited people with positive or negative views of themselves.
• Focused on people with negative views to differentiate from self-enhancement.

Strategy 1: Find or Search Out for Self-Verifying Interaction Partners

• Example Study:

  • Cover story: Impression formation task (getting acquainted).
  • Prescreening questionnaire to determine positive or negative views.
  • Participants asked if experimenter could share responses with three other students.
  • The "other students" would each form an opinion about the actual participant based on a small subset of responses.
  • Participants would get to read these evaluations and decide how much they wanted to interact with the evaluator in a subsequent getting to know you or getting acquainted task.
  • Evaluations were prepared in advance with generally favorable, neutral, and unfavorable ratings.
  • Participants read evaluations in a counterbalanced order.

• Findings:

  • $72\%$ of participants with positive self-views chose positive evaluators.
  • $78\%$ of participants with negative self-views chose negative evaluators.

• Think aloud responses were coded, finding participants preferred partners who they thought saw them or understood them.

• Quote from participant with negative self-view: "I prefer to interact with people who evaluate us in the same way that we see ourselves."

Strategy 2: Communicate Self-Perceptions via Identity Cues

• Male participants interacted with someone they expected would view them similarly/differently based on evaluation content.

• Interaction partner (always a woman) saw them favorably/unfavorably.

• Third-party observers evaluated behavior in the interaction.

• Findings:

  • Male participants behaved in ways that confirmed existing self-views, especially when interacting with someone who evaluated them inconsistently.
  • Communicated self-views in subtle ways.

Strategy 3: Biased Attention

• Participants told another person had evaluated them.
• Read a mix of evaluations, including evaluations of another person. Participants spent longer reading evaluations consistent with their self-views.

Debates About Self-Verification

Alternative Explanations

• Early criticisms suggested people seeking negative feedback had flawed personalities.
  • Swan responded with studies involving individuals meeting clinical thresholds for depression/dysphoria.
    • Found only people with negative self views preferred negative evaluators. So you don't have to have clinically notable depression to be someone who seeks negative self evaluations.
• Alternative explanation: People thought the evaluator was similar to them on many domains and wanted to interact with someone similar.
  • Think aloud paradigm suggests not the case since participants never said they wanted to meet with the person because they thought they were similar, but that those who had negative self evaluations wanted to meet because the evaluator had similar views to their own.
• What about maybe people who choose to engage with a negative evaluator because they they're they're inspired by the challenge, and they want to try to convert the negative evaluator into a positive evaluator?
  • Found that it was a small minority of people.

Universality of Self-Verification

• Study: Participants from India and the U.S. read positive/negative evaluations and estimated accuracy.

• Results:

  • In both cultures, there was a "crossover interaction".

    • People with high sociability who got positive evaluations rated them as accurate.
    • People with low sociability who got positive evaluations rated them as less accurate.
    • People with high sociability who got negative feedback rated it as inaccurate.
    • People with low sociability who got negative feedback that is consistent with their self views because I don't think they're particularly social, they're rating and it's stronger in American participants than in Indian participants, participants from The US, participants from India.. This shows evidence there's something universal going on.

Adaptiveness of Self-Verification

• Getting non-self-verifying information can be detrimental.

  • People with negative self-views show a threat response to positive feedback.
  • People with negative self-views experiencing positive life events are more likely to get sick afterward.

• Self verification can also promote survival. When you're consistent with yourself and you're predictable, that's good for you.

• Being a predictable person helps the individual and their group.

• Being on the same page as your romantic partner can be helpful for division of household labor or raising a child together.

• A 2017 study found that highly qualified job candidates were more likely to receive job offers if they had higher self verification strivings.

Self-Verification is Adaptive

• Helps to reduce anxiety (cognitive dissonance reduction).
• Helps improve group functioning.
• Boundary condition: Self-verification may not be adaptive in cases of extreme negative self-views.

Self-Enhancement and Self-Verification

• Meta-analysis compared effect sizes for self-enhancement and self-verification motives.

• Findings:

  • Cognitive response (perceived accuracy of feedback): Self-verification is stronger.

    • Self verification - Among people who have negative self views, negative feedback is perceived to be more accurate.

  • Affective mood responses: Negative feedback feels bad (self-enhancement). Gets negative feedback is associated with more positive mood (self-verification).

  • Relationship quality: Depends on the level of rejection risk.

    • So when you're in a dating relationship where the level of rejection risk is high, then you prefer self enhance the self enhancement effect is stronger than the self verification effect.
    • for people in committed relationships, long term committed relationships, the self verification effect is stronger than the self evaluation sorry, the self enhancement effect.

• Compromise: Strategic self-verification.

  • We want partners to view us positively on relationship-relevant dimensions but prefer self-verifying evaluations on non-relevant aspects.

Self-Assessment (Where Do I Stand?)

• Wanting to know how they're doing in various domains

• People want to be able to provide and come up with an accurate assessment of themselves

• Seeking accurate information about ourselves (even if unfavorable).

• Looking for new information to clarify and understand ourselves better.

• Festinger's social comparison theory:

  • Motivated to accurately figure out who we are by engaging in social comparison processes (especially in domains without objective evaluation).
  • Choose similar comparison targets for accurate reflection, but also seek out better people to plot a path for improvement.

• Much of self-assessment involves forced comparison (information is presented to them).

Lockwood and Kunda: Positive Response to Upward Comparison

• Inspiration.

• Key insight: Attainability matters.

  • Does the person making the comparison have the opportunity to get to that level that the upward comparison target has has reached or not?

• Study Setup:

  • Participants read an article about a fourth-year student in the same major or they're reading nothing about they're reading something else or nothing, something that's not a bad person. Importantly, their participants were first year accountant majors accounting majors, and students who were in fourth year and about to graduate with their with their degree.
  • Measurement: Self-evaluations.
  • Students reading about superstar (first or fourth year about other 4th year student)

• Results:

  • First-year students rated themselves more positively compared to the control group.
  • Fourth-year students' ratings were not statistically significant (self valuations are lower than people for whom they still have three years to attain those awards, tame those successes, and get those accolades.

Negative Responses to Downward Comparison

• Downcast or deflation.

• Vulnerability is a key factor.

  • Degree to which people feel vulnerable to that fate will influence whether they feel pretty good after a downward comparison or whether they might actually feel deflated to a negative outcome.

• Instead of measuring upcast or inspiration, measuring downcast or rather feeling badly about yourself

• Study Setup:

  • Instead of having participants read about superstar, now reading about someone who's not doing well and control the participants for not reading that at all. Manipulations in studies:
    • They're reading about a first year student who says, I have found my classes harder, and my marks have been going down.
    • The recent graduate I tried to get a job, but it's harder than I expected
  • People engage in an exercise about how they could become like the target.
  • Study participants (only first year students)

• Results:

  • Participants who read about a poorly coping peer (another first year student who says they are struggling, but participants not affected too much), had higher self ratings than the two aforementioned groups.
  • Participants who read about the recent grad had lower self ratings than the self rating as previously listed, where students stated they did not have an effect when reading about a recently graduated person.
  • Recently graduated students were not doing well (students wanted excel) or didn't want end up being as the subject students were researching.

• This experiment, however, took into account there just improved by somehow equating the two sets of outcomes.

  • Should have been equated in terms of kind of severity.

Summary of Self Motives

• Three self motives each motivate the pursuit of different information types.

  • Self Enhancement, Self Verification, and Self Assesment

• Self enhancement that seems to be the most prevalent motive on a daily basis as least in Western societies, followed by self verification, and self enhancement seems to be the least prevalent.

  • Important to note that there were some issues. for some of these topics that were presented about there were some problems about alternative options that were refute, and boundary problems that did refute from what was mentioned.

Self-Esteem: A Social Cognition Perspective

• Assessment: How do you view yourself. What is your self worth.

• It's a dominant theme or construct here in in social psychology, but also in pop psychology. So many of you will get advice or heard advice or heard the term self esteem thrown around.

• The construct has been operationalized by scales such as the Rosenberg self esteem scale developed in 1965 (adolescent samples).

  • What assesses: people feel that they are on an equal basis with one another, with other people. They feel that they they might feel highly about themselves and I think positively highly of themselves, but they're not saying they're superior to other people.

Correlates of High Global Self-Esteem

• Academic achievement, physical health, and psychological health.

• Note: Messy construct influenced by shared method variance.

• Self esteem often assessed by questionnaires and in addition self esteem is a self report. When both are mixed together it causes by together share from sort a biased. If that same information is objective in this topic there's shared same info from two constructs. There correlation of both between is measured with more effective measure

• Correlation does not equal causation.

Longitudinal Studies

• Meaasures managed from 11 years old and tracked for 15 years
• Person's level of as a young person can have good positive outcomes, BUT there were confounding things. It was even used objective measures to make positive self worth to feel the self.

Self-Esteem and Antisocial Behavior

• Bellmiser and colleagues identify subset of people with very high self esteem who are aggressive.
• Aggression that is NOT associated with lower global self esteem BUT instead unstable with highly of itself esteem
• Developed Ego Threat Model:
  • People feel very positive, but when they're threaten like with an insult they become aggressive

Narcissism

• Characterized as passionately wanting to feel well of oneself. It's overinflated sense of positive self worth. People who have narcissism feel like they are superior not related equal to. The disproportionate valud with self that centered and entitled
• Global self esteem (feeling equal to another has no hierarchy.)
• Moderate is significant, moderate and positive
• Can by may be unpopular, not feel well known as a good person in terms of having friends. So when friends are involved they're squeak you on feet, but once you get to know them becomes unpleasant for the receiver.

Testing the Ego Threat Model

• When participants did testing measured with narcissism and esteem

• Participants were ask to view their reviews on their abortion writing

• People can right to what they feel, then receive the other evaluated positive negative. It just given negative or praises. You get aggressive and threaten if told the negative results.

• Results:

  • Did not put any regression. Higher in narcissism showed aggressive responses than the very low people.