On confidence and consequence: The certainty and importance of self-knowledge.
- 1 January 1991
- journal article
- research article
- Published by American Psychological Association (APA) in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology
- Vol. 60 (4) , 518-530
- https://doi.org/10.1037//0022-3514.60.4.518
Abstract
Belief certainty and belief importance represent 2 relatively independent forms of investment in the self-concept. Three studies with college students suggested that whereas certainty is associated with epistemic (i.e., rational or informational) factors, importance is more closely associated with emotive (i.e., emotional and motivational) factors. A 4th study explored the implications of certainty and importance for the temporal stability of people's self-views and revealed that whereas belief certainty was associated with the stability of both positive and negative beliefs, belief importance was associated with the stability of positive beliefs only. The implications of belief investment for the verification-enhancement debate and for the structure and measurement of the self-concept are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)Keywords
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