Self-Affirmation Theory

Definition

The self-affirmation theory posits that people have a fundamental motivation to maintain self-integrity, a perception of themselves as good, virtuous, and able to predict and control important outcomes. In virtually all cultures and historical periods, there are socially shared conceptions of what it means to be a person of self-integrity. Having self-integrity means that one perceives oneself as living up to a culturally specified conception of goodness, virtue, and agency. Self-affirmation theory examines how people maintain self-integrity when this perception of the self is threatened.

Background and History

From humanist psychologists like Abraham Maslow and Carl Rogers to contemporary investigators examining the psychology of self-esteem, there has been a historical emphasis in psychology on the importance of people's sense of personal regard. Some have suggested that a sense of personal regard emerges early in the life of an infant and remains relatively stable through the lifetime.

Contemporary researchers have documented the various adaptations people deploy to maintain selfRegard. The social psychologist Daniel Gilbert and his colleagues have suggested that people have a psychological immune system that initiates psychological adaptations to threats to self-regard. Indeed, these protective adaptations may lead to rationalizations and even distortions of reality. The social psychologist Tony Greenwald described the self as totalitarian in its ambition to interpret the world in a way congenial to its desires and needs. People view themselves as able to control outcomes that they objectively cannot. They take excessive credit for success while denying responsibility for failure. They are overoptimistic in their predictions of future success and are blind to their own incompetence. People resist updating their beliefs and behavior in light of new experience and information, preferring to maintain the illusion that they were right [Page 788]all along. Although people are certainly capable of realism and self-criticism, ego-defensiveness nevertheless seems to be a pervasive human penchant.

The social psychologist Claude Steele first proposed the theory of self-affirmation. A major insight of this theory involves the notion that although people try to maintain specific self-images (such as “being a good student” or “being a good family member”), that is not their primary motivation. Rather, individuals are motivated to maintain global self-integrity, a general perception of their goodness, virtue, and efficacy. There is thus some fungibility in the sources of self-integrity. If individuals feel relatively positive about themselves in one domain, they are willing and able to tolerate a threat to their self-integrity in another domain.

Self-affirmation theory led to a reinterpretation of classic research findings in cognitive dissonance. In a classic cognitive dissonance study, people are shown to change their attitudes to bring them in line with their past behavior. People led to commit an action espousing a position with which they disagree (for example, students who write in favor of tuition increases) subsequently come to agree with the position when they believe that their actions were freely chosen. Doing so is a form of rationalization and selfjustification; it convinces the individual that his or her action was the right one. Previously, such effects had been viewed as evidence of a basic motivation for psychological consistency; people want to see their attitudes as consistent with their actions. However, Steele and colleagues demonstrated that these effects arise, in part, from the motivation to maintain self-integrity. Thus, when people are given an opportunity to affirm their self-integrity in an alternative domain, the rationalization effect disappears. For example, when people were given the opportunity to express the importance of a cherished personal value (for example, when science students were allowed to don a white lab coat, or when people who valued aesthetics were allowed to assert their love of art), these individuals did not defensively change their attitudes to make them concordant with their behavior.

...