Self-Assessment

Self-assessment, or the desire to know the truth about oneself, is one of four self-evaluation motives that pervade the study of the self. Self-assessment is characterized by a motivation to accurately evaluate one's self or self-concept. A key feature of this motive that distinguishes it from other self-evaluation motives (i.e., self-enhancement, self-verification, and self-improvement) is that people desire to accurately evaluate themselves, sometimes at the risk of learning information that is negative with respect to their abilities. Individuals engage in self-assessment to reduce uncertainty about their abilities and self-concepts, or put simply, to increase their self-knowledge. An accurate diagnosis of one's abilities allows individuals to feel confident making predictions regarding their world and their place within the world.

People use a variety of tools to increase or acquire self-knowledge. Leon Festinger's 1954 social comparison theory rests on the assumption that people turn to similar others to assess their own abilities and opinions. Specifically, people engage in this comparison process to evaluate the veracity of their opinions and the extent of their abilities in the absence of an objective means of [Page 673]evaluation. For example, students commonly compare exam marks to determine where their individual class performance lies in comparison with other students’ marks. The study of self-assessment is often researched within the achievement realm. By definition, achievement implies assessment, thus offering a germane means of studying when and how people choose to engage in self-assessment.

Research in self-assessment has consistently demonstrated that individuals actively seek to engage in activities that provide diagnostic information concerning their abilities. The extent to which people prefer diagnostic tasks depends on their uncertainty with their abilities; thus, individuals seek tasks that provide them with self-knowledge concerning their abilities in an effort to reduce this feeling of uncertainty. Importantly, research on self-assessment has demonstrated that when uncertain of their abilities within a particular domain, people do not actively avoid a task that they believe will provide them with a negative evaluation of their abilities; rather, they seek evaluative and diagnostic practices regardless of how positively or negatively they elucidate their abilities. The veracity of the test of their abilities motivates people to engage in this process of self-assessment, as an accurate ability to know their own abilities increases confidence in people's predictions regarding their capabilities. Along the same lines, people will also engage in a task longer when they believe that the task will diagnose their abilities than when the task cannot provide them with self-knowledge, further highlighting the importance of acquiring self-knowledge regarding one's own abilities.

Though uncertainty about one's abilities may lead most individuals to seek self-assessment, a great deal of literature suggests that self-enhancement may be a competing self-motive. For example, people may compare themselves with less fortunate others, particularly when they feel threatened or are experiencing low self-esteem, in an attempt to self-enhance. The motive for this comparison is not an accurate self-assessment, but rather an attempt to attain or maintain a favorable sense of self. Often, an accurate diagnosis of ability may threaten the self-concept (e.g., in the case of a good student failing his first calculus exam, there is the potential threat to the student perceiving himself as a good student). Research in both self-assessment and self-enhancement demonstrates that these apparently contradictory motives (i.e., accuracy of self-knowledge vs. enhancement) can be explained by the importance of the ability being assessed. Research comparing these two motives has highlighted that people prefer to engage in diagnostic tasks when they are uncertain regarding their peripheral traits or tasks (i.e., traits and tasks that are not central or important to the self-concept). On the contrary, this same line of research suggests that people tend to avoid diagnostic feedback for central traits and tasks when there is an indication that the feedback will be negative, in an attempt to protect the self-concept (i.e., self-enhancement).

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