Self-Affirmations Provide a Broader Perspective on Self-Threat

Abstract

We present an "affirmation as perspective" model of how self-affirmations alleviate threat and defensiveness. Self-threats dominate the working self-concept, leading to a constricted self disproportionately influenced by the threat. Self-affirmations expand the size of the working self-concept, offering a broader perspective in which the threat appears more narrow and self-worth realigns with broader dispositional self-views (Experiment 1). Self-affirmed participants, relative to those not affirmed, indicated that threatened self-aspects were less all-defining of the self (although just as important), and this broader perspective on the threat mediated self-affirmation's reduction of defensiveness (Experiment 2). Finally, having participants complete a simple perspective exercise, which offered a broader perspective on the self without prompting affirmational thinking (Experiment 3a), reduced defensiveness in a manner equivalent to and redundant with a standard self-affirmation manipulation (Experiment 3b). The present model offers a unifying account for a wide variety of seemingly unrelated findings and mysteries in the self-affirmation literature.

RETRACTED: Don’t stop believing: Rituals improve performance by decreasing anxiety

“…We propose that even secular rituals may provide a sense of meaning and perspective, allowing people to expand their working self-concept beyond the threatened domain (e.g., Critcher & Dunning, 2014). Finally, a fourth possibility is that rituals function as a type of placebo (e.g., Crum & Langer, 2007).…”

The hard-knock life? Whites claim hardships in response to racial inequity

“…We included an additional control condition "Non-Affirmation" in which participants wrote why their 9th ranked value may be important to someone else. Recent work has suggested potential problems with this control technique (e.g., Critcher, Dunning, & Armor, 2010;Critcher & Dunning, 2015). Given our hypotheses regard comparisons between Affirmation and Control, we report only participants from the Affirmation or Control conditions in the main text.…”

The Politics of Affirmation Theory

“…In fact, Critcher and Dunning (2015) demonstrated that affirming the self reduces defensiveness in the face of threat precisely because it expands the working self-concept and directs attention away from the threatened domain. We posit that a group-affirmation manipulation, in contrast, may directly activate that group's self-aspect or social identity, making any constructs associated with that group psychologically predominant.…”