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Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 17, No. 4, 363-368 (1991)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167291174002

Escaping the Self: The Moderating Effect of Self-Complexity

Thomas M. Dixon

Case Western Reserve University

Roy F. Baumeister

Case Western Reserve University

The present experiment measured the speed with which people escaped from a highly self-focusing situation after an initial failure or success. Consistent with predictions, the fastest escapes were found among people who were low in self-complexity and who experienced initial failure. These results support the notion that high self-complexity serves as a buffer against the threatening implications of failure, presumably because many aspects of the self-concept remain untouched by the failure. Additional findings showed that failure impaired the subsequent performance (in writing an essay about the self of people with low self-complexity, but it actually improved the performance of people with high self-complexity. These results suggest that an identical failure may have different levels of global aversiveness and may elicit different coping styles as a function of self-complexity.


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