Self-Esteem, Self-Enhancement, and Self-Verification
Lay people outside the field of Psychology always assert that Psychology is common sense, and even their grandparents know the findings. However, psychology researchers have proved again and again that there are many counter-intuitive results. For example, I bet your teachers have told you for at least once that never change your multiple choice answers if you are not sure, and the intuition is often right. But studies have proved that changing your answers after some cognitive effort may actually lead to higher chance of getting it right.
It’s the same case for self-esteem. The general view is that everyone, no matter if you are a person with high self-esteem (HSE) or low self-esteem (LSH), loves to become the spotlight of the group and be self-enhanced by hearing how good you are. But various researches have proven that this is true for people with HSE, but not true for people with LSE. In fact, LSE people are more inclined to seek unfavorable evaluations, favor interaction partners who evaluate them unfavorably (replicated) over those who evaluate them favorably, and are likely to withdraw in relationships in which their spouse views them favorably.
The most famous experiment regarding to this subject was conducted by Dr. William Swann in 1990. In order for you to really understand this study, I need to first explain the main cognitive difference between self-enhancement and self-verification processes: Self-enhancement is an automatic process, i.e., you don’t need to think about it and you would choose to have it. Whereas self-verification is a cognitive process, i.e., it takes cognitive effort to think about it and it’s usually not your first natural response. To generate automatic responses, researchers usually ask participants to memorize >7 digits number to induce a cognitive load, so that participants don’t have enough cognitive resources to choose the process that requires thinking. Participants of his study were evaluated on their mental health and happiness level by clinical psychology students. Two 20+ pages reports, one positive and one negative, were generated at the end. Participants were asked to choose which report to read. The majority of the HSE people (no matter with the cognitive load or not) chose the positive report to read, people with LSE who had cognitive load automatically chose to read the positive report as well; however, the main finding is in the group including people with LSE and without the cognitive load: the majority of them chose to read the negative report, which will make them feel bad but in the main time self-verifying.
You may ask how to measure self-esteem? The major way to measure self-esteem in a research setting is by using questionnaires, and one of the most famous questionnaires is called ‘Rosenberg Self Esteem Scale‘. This scale has been used in more than 100 research projects, but is NOT a diagnostic aid for any psychological issues of states. The scale consists of 10 statements and you choose the extent to which you agree with each statement. When you answer the questions you need to choose the automatic response, i.e., without over-thinking. This scale can give you a better picture of your state in relation to other people because it gives you a distribution of general population’s overall score (total of 30) at the end of the study. You can find a copy of the questionnaire online. (I tried to paste into my post, but the format changed completely).
Hao(Jeffrey) WU, PSYC 406–2015, student ID: 260504626
I published this blog on Thursday (Jan 29th), and just added it to the publication group. (I wasn’t registered as a writer for the group PSYC 406, so couldn’t put my blog into the group early on).
