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Self-Verification and Contextualized Self-Views

Tammy English

Kaiping Peng

University of California, Berkeley

Whereas most self-verification research has focused on people's desire to verify their global self-conceptions, the present studies examined self-verification with regard to contextualized selfviews—views of the self in particular situations and relationships. It was hypothesized that individuals whose core self-conceptions include contextualized self-views should seek to verify these self-views. In Study 1, the more individuals defined the self in dialectical terms, the more their judgments were biased in favor of verifying over nonverifying feedback about a negative, situation-specific self-view. In Study 2, consistent with research on gender differences in the importance of relationships to the self-concept, women but not men showed a similar bias toward feedback about a negative, relationship-specific self-view, a pattern not seen for global self-views. Together, the results support the notion that self-verification occurs for core self-conceptions, whatever form(s) they may take. Individual differences in self-verification and the nature of selfhood and authenticity are discussed.

Key Words: self-verification • contextualized self-views • individual differences • authenticity • relational self

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