7.4: Self-Evaluation: Self-Enhancement and Self-Verification

Social psychologists have documented that feeling good about ourselves and maintaining positive self-esteem is a powerful motivator of human behavior (Tavris & Aronson, 2008). In the United States, members of the predominant culture typically think very highly of themselves and view themselves as good people who are above average on many desirable traits (Ehrlinger, Gilovich, & Ross, 2005). Often, our behavior, attitudes, and beliefs are affected when we experience a threat to our self-esteem or positive self-image.

Adolescence and Refining Identities

During adolescence, teenagers continue to refine their sense of self as they relate to others. Erikson referred to the task of the adolescent as one of identity versus role confusion. Thus, in Erikson’s view, an adolescent’s main questions are “Who am I?” and “Who do I want to be?” Some adolescents adopt the values and roles that their parents expect for them. Other teens develop identities that are in opposition to their parents but align with a peer group. This is common as peer relationships become a central focus in adolescents’ lives.

As adolescents work to form their identities, they pull away from their parents, and the peer group becomes very important (Shanahan, McHale, Osgood, & Crouter, 2007). Despite spending less time with their parents, most teens report positive feelings toward them (Moore, Guzman, Hair, Lippman, & Garrett, 2004). Warm and healthy parent-child relationships have been associated with positive child outcomes, such as better grades and fewer school behavior problems, in the United States as well as in other countries (Hair et al., 2005).

This text is adapted from OpenStax, Psychology. OpenStax CNX.

People can have different motivations for how they want other people to see them, depending on their priority at hand. For instance, sometimes individuals may want to be seen as even better than they are, and at other times, they may want to be identified as who they believe they are.

On the one hand, if the virtuous person receives negative feedback, say from a love interest calling off their date because he doesn’t like her personality, her self-perception could change without any further effort.

In this case, the individual has a need for self-enhancement—a desire to maintain, increase, or protect one’s positive self-views. To accomplish this motive, she can employ several strategies.

One approach is to use affirmations—declarations that uphold valued aspects of one’s self. Here, based on the self-affirmation theory, she could maintain self-worth by affirming herself in a domain—like her amazing writing accomplishments—that’s unrelated to the threat on personality.

In another setting, she may even construe a situation to pursue self-enhancement, whether she knows it or not. For example, she thinks of times when someone else, such as her friend, was considerate, as well as those when she was downright ill-mannered. She then judges her pal as being rude based on an ambiguous average.

However, when she thinks about her own kindness, she recalls an extreme time when she provided extraordinary assistance, outside of her routine behavior.

This inconsistency fits into the better-than-average effect—the finding that most people, at least most Westerners, think they are above average across various personality traits and abilities.

On the other hand, according to the self-verification theory, individuals can also strive for stable and subjectively accurate beliefs to provide a sense of coherence. In other words, they get others to verify their pre-existing beliefs about themselves.

For instance, her sister, who has a negative self-view, tends to spend more time thinking about negative criticism and prefers to interact with others who ruminate similarly.

To increase the likelihood that others’ impressions confirm her self-view, she employs another strategy—one that involves displaying identity cues. That is, she wears dark clothes, collects melancholy stickers, and has a boyfriend who appears as unenthusiastic. Thus, their outward identities are consistent with their self-views.

In the end, while people may strategize to be evaluated for who they are, they may also be motived to be seen as slightly better versions of themselves, especially in emotional situations.