The need for understanding serves as a theme throughout social and personality psychology. It is reflected in people's striving toward a shared, social construction of reality (e.g., conformity, uniformity) that runs through so much of the history of theory and research in the field. Stemming from this core motivation, the literature is peppered with illustrations of the preeminence of certainty as a goal (e.g., clarity, consistency, consonance, and related constructs) and the ultimate objective of cultural consensus. Yet, the role of doubt in the form of shaky certainty about the basis for beliefs in attitudes -or doubts about one's self-esteem or self-concept -has increasingly taken center stage. This review takes the self-competence element (vs. self-liking element) of selfworth judgments as its focus and provides an integration of individual difference approaches and experimental investigations of self-doubt. Long neglected, self-doubt increasingly appears critical for understanding some of the surprising, ironic, and self-defeating cognitive, emotional, and behavioral findings seen in the achievement realm.Four be the things I'd been better without: Love, curiosity, freckles, and doubt Dorothy ParkerThe fundamental cause of the trouble is that in the modern world the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt Bertrand Russell Certainty and clarity are prized and desired, except when they aren't. A careful search for pithy quotations about the value of clarity reveals little, while the virtues of doubt are widely praised. Yet, the preeminence of certainty and clarity as a core human social motive (among social and personality psychologists) is revealed in the central spot accorded the need to understand (e.g., Fiske, 2004). People are said to wish to know things quickly and clearly and to predict things well enough to function in ordinary daily social life (e.g., Heider, 1958). The value of the shared, social construction of reality can be traced through the Festinger tradition (e.g., 1950, 1954, 1957) where disunity among people is psychologically uncomfortable and produces pressures toward uniformity (1950), lack of certainty produces social information seeking (i.e., affiliation) driven by the desire for clarity (1954), and ultimately one's own beliefs and behavior push people away from dissonance and toward consistency of beliefs (1957); indeed, people sometimes place a premium on certainty, clarity, and consonance (a satisfying sense of reality) in the face of objective facts to the contrary. Dissonance is dismissed even when the facts are clearly in conflict and impossible to reconcile -as when prophesy fails (e.g., Gal & Rucker, 2010).People bother to make sense of themselves and one another (e.g., attribution; social cognition) to satisfy this core motive of understanding, setting the stage for the important Social and Personality Psychology Compass 6/6 (2012):

The present research examines how self-concept clarity moderates the impact of feedback about one's self-knowledge. A preliminary study shows that individuals with higher clarity expect the process of defining who they are to be easier than those with lower clarity. Two experiments then test the effect of self-concept clarity on the experience of self-elaboration under conditions of either doubt or confidence. The results suggest that people with higher self-concept clarity show greater differences in self-evaluations based on whether their experience of describing the self is nested within ease and confidence or difficulty and doubt. We suggest that this effect may be a result of the different expectations high-and low-clarity individuals have for the task of describing the self.

Since its introduction, self-concept clarity has been viewed as a construct related to the structure and organization of a person's self-concept. We argue, however, that self-concept clarity may best be understood as a combination of subjective, metacognitive beliefs about the self-concept and objective structure and organization. We consider the unique inf luences of both objective and subjective clarity and offer some suggestions and novel hypotheses for investigating this proposed distinction.

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