On the confluence of self processes

Is There an "I" in "Team"? The Role of the Self in Group-Serving Judgments.

“…When the participants finished ranking the values, the experimenter collected the questionnaire and randomly assigned the participants to either the affirmation condition, in which they received a scale that corresponded to their most important value, or the no-affirmation condition, in which they received a scale that corresponded to their least important value. The value scales, which have been used in other selfaffirmation studies (Sherman et al, 2000;Steele & Liu, 1983;Tesser & Cornell, 1991), provided the key elements of the self-affirmation manipulation. The value scales are theorized to affirm the self by making important values, values central to the individual's self-image, salient (Steele, 1988).…”

The Psychology of Self‐defense: Self‐Affirmation Theory

“…In performance settings, they behave in ways that maintain their self-esteem, for example, by sabotaging the performance of close others (rather than that of strangers) on important intellectual tasks (Tesser & Smith, 1980). Moreover, supporting the idea of interchangeability or fluidity in self-defensive processes, aYrmation of an important value reduces people's tendency to sabotage the performance of friends working on intellectual tasks (Tesser & Cornell, 1991). People are also more likely to spontaneously self-aYrm, for example, by writing essays with more self-aYrming content, after making a self-threatening upward comparison (Tesser, Crepaz, Collins, Cornell, & Beach, 2000).…”

Principles, processes, and puzzles of social cognition: An introduction for the special issue on social cognitive neuroscience

“…These effects even occur when it is not immediately obvious how someone should respond in order to be most self-enhancing (Dunning and Cohen, 1992), suggesting that the impact of motivation on reasoning may be outside of awareness. Additionally, these effects are often found to be stronger when an individual's self-image is threatened (Beauregard and Dunning, 1998;Brown and Gallagher, 1992) and weaker when an individual's self-image is affirmed (Steele, 1988;Tesser and Cornell, 1991), suggesting that a motivation to maintain one's self-image is a driving force in these effects. These positive illusions (Greenwald, 1980;Taylor and Brown, 1988) and motivated reasoning processes (Kunda, 1990) seem to conflict with the general view that cognitive processes are designed to represent the world accurately; when it comes to ourselves, we appear instead to want to view ourselves positively, although not always (Swann et al, 1989).…”