Naïve beliefs shape emotional reactions to evaluative feedback

ABSTRACT

People are motivated to acquire self-evaluative information that favours themselves (self-enhancement) or information that confirms their present self-views (self-consistency). We proposed that participants' naïve theories characterising self-esteem as important may moderate their self-enhancement motivations. Across three samples, we demonstrated that increasing self-esteem importance causes prevention-based emotional reactions to become increasingly dependent on the favorability of feedback. We thus infer that self-enhancement motivation increases when people hold favourable beliefs about the importance of maximising self-esteem. We also replicated past findings in which people regard positive (versus negative) self-relevant information as more valid when they have high (versus low) self-esteem, revealing self-consistency. Individual differences in self-esteem importance and trait self-esteem thus play distinct roles in shaping people’s enhancement and consistency motivations.

KEYWORDS:

• Self-enhancement
• self-consistency
• self-esteem importance
• self-esteem
• evaluative feedback

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to Leandre Fabrigar, David Hauser, and Devin Fowlie for their comments on this manuscript.

Notes

1 Swann and colleagues (2007) have argued for a “specificity-matching principle” whereby feedback should match a specific self-view to maximally elicit verification effects. Strictly, people’s global self-worth is not specificity-matched to IQ-specific feedback. That said, we have found in several unpublished datasets that our population scores highest on academic (versus other) self-esteem contingencies (Crocker et al., 2003), implying that intelligence likely is a dominant aspect of our participants’ global self-worth.

2 An anonymous reviewer commented that we should further anticipate that self-esteem importance would moderate the effect of feedback valence on validity and reliability, given that self-enhancement effects on cognitive reactions were significantly positive in Kwang and Swann’s meta-analysis. See Supplementary-5 for why we did not.

3 During piloting we used a control passage that provided “neutral” information about self-esteem (e.g., distinguishing it from self-concept). Participants’ open-ended thought records showed that our control passage produced thoughts supportive of self-esteem’s importance. Therefore, in all three samples of the main study we used a clearly self-irrelevant control passage discussing people’s attitudes concerning nuclear power (retaining the SE-Good and SE-Not-Good passages developed in piloting).

4 Our suspicion rate (9%) is slightly higher than comparable research (5-6%, Spencer et al., 1998). One explanation is that our inclusion of self-esteem, self-esteem importance, emotion, and test diagnosticity items increased participants’ suspiciousness by the end of the procedure.

5 Open materials/data are available at https://osf.io/4yrnt/andSupplementary-1.

6 The (centered) measure of self-esteem importance X feedback type also was significant, B = .30 [.03, .58], t(642) = 2.16, p = .031. Positive versus negative feedback significantly increased prevention-based emotion at higher (+1 SD) self-esteem importance, B = .61, t(642) = 4.12, p < .0001, but not at lower (-1 SD) self-esteem importance, B = .16, t(642) = 1.05, p = .292.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Canada Foundation for Innovation: [Grant Number 7115]; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada: [Grant Number 430-2018-00509,767-2018-1484].