The fleeting gleam of praise: Cognitive processes underlying behavioral reactions to self-relevant feedback.

1 January 1990

journal article
Published by American Psychological Association (APA) in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Vol. 59 (1) , 17-26
https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.59.1.17

Abstract

We propose that a preference for favorable social feedback (i.e., self-enhancement) requires only that feedback be characterized as favorable or unfavorable but that a preference for self-confirming feedback (i.e., self-verification) is based on a more elaborate set of cognitive operations that requires both the characterization of feedback and a subsequent comparison of that feedback to a representation of self stored in memory. Study 1 set the stage for testing this hypothesis by showing that depriving people of processing resources interfered with their tendency to access their self-conceptions. In Studies 2 and 3, participants who were deprived of resources preferred the favorable, self-enhancing evaluator, whereas control participants displayed a preference for the self-verifying evaluator, even if that evaluator was relatively unfavorable.

Keywords

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