Self-Expansion Theory

Definition

Close relationships open up new worlds to people. As you interact with roommates, close friends, and relationship partners in college, you will probably start to notice small parts of yourself changing to become a little more like them and vice versa. For example, you might notice that you start taking more interest in sports if you have a partner who always watches basketball and football games on television. Before you know it, you might think of yourself as a sports buff!

Relationships can help shape our identities, and they can provide us with shared resources. If your partner owns a car and you do not, you will likely occasionally get a ride to get groceries or go out to dinner. Or if you have a nicer apartment than your partner's, he or she will likely benefit by spending more time at your place. Besides developing a sense of ourselves and receiving extra resources, we can also develop different perspectives from close relationships. For example, if your partner is from a small town in the Midwest and you are from a large East Coast city, you will likely learn a lot about each other's worldviews just by interacting and talking.

These changes to people's identities, resources, and perspectives that occur in relationships are described in and explained by self-expansion theory. This theory says that it is very important for people's sense of self to expand and grow throughout their lives for them to feel satisfied with their lives. Although close relationships can provide us with a rich source of potential expansion, people can experience this type of growth in other ways: through spirituality, creativity, and their interactions with valued objects.

People really enjoy the feeling of self-expansion, and as a result, they try very hard to look for selfexpansive opportunities. People can do this in various ways. For example, some people might look for new relationships to keep the positive feeling of growth alive, whereas others might instead try new activities with current relationship partners as a way to increase their self-expansion.

What happens if your best friend bombs a chemistry midterm? Will you react to his or her failure as if it was your own, or will you suddenly want to shrink away from your friend? It makes sense that people include others' positive elements in their selfconcepts when they grow. After all, it usually feels good to have successful friends. However, selfexpansion is not necessarily selfish: People don't only include the good elements of others in themselves when they grow. The fact that some people might even include others' negative elements in themselves shows how strong the need to selfexpand is; it might even be stronger than our need to make ourselves feel good! Finally, like other human motivations, self-expansion is not necessarily a conscious one; a person may not always be aware of why he or she wants to meet new people and try new things.

Background and History

The motivation to self-expand is tied to people's ability to accomplish their goals, thus self-expansion is related to psychological models of self-efficacy, intrinsic motivation, self-actualization, and the selfimprovement motivation. The idea that the self is created through relationships with close others goes back to Martin Buber's conception of the “Thou” and “I” uniting and is also related to George Herbert Mead's work on social interactions. Carl Jung believed that relationship partners could draw out otherwise hidden aspects of the self to create greater wholeness, and [Page 827]Abraham Maslow thought that loved ones could be included in people's self-concepts. Within social psychology, Fritz Heider's concept of the unit relation that can form between close others comes closest to Art and Elaine Aron's recent idea of inclusion of others in the self.

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