Responses to evaluation as a function of initial self-perceptions.

Abstract

The relationship between favorability of one's initial attitudes toward himself and his reactions to evaluative feedback was examined. In accord with consistency theories, evaluations consistent with one's initial expectancies were more accurately retained, given more credence, and assumed to result more from one's own abilities than were those which were inconsistent. Affective reactions were more in line with self-enhancement views: They were more favorable to positive than to negative evaluations, and this was as much, if not more, the case for people with negative expectancies as for those with positive expectancies. Other theoretical implications were discussed as well as ambiguities and limitations in the available evidence.

The cognitive–affective crossfire: When self-consistency confronts self-enhancement.

“…Although such individuals might value such feedback on a cognitive level, they would also find it affectively abhorrent. Although Shrauger's (1975) hypothesis was reasonably consistent with the existing data, workers in the area were slow to accept it. One problem was that Shrauger provided little theoretical justification for his notion that cognitive and affective responses were independent.…”

“…The major problem with the evidence Shrauger (1975) cited in support of his cognitive-affective independence hypothesis was that researchers had examined either cognitive or affective reactions; no one had examined both types of reactions in the context of a single study. This introduced the possibility that procedural differences other than the nature of the dependent variable could have accounted for the conflicting results of those who examined cognitive versus affective reactions.…”

“…Several decades of research have produced mixed results, with some studies favoring self-consistency theory and others favoring self-enhancement theory (for reviews, see Jones, 1973;Shrauger, 1975;Swann, 1985). Shrauger (1975) attempted to bring order to this confusing state of affairs by suggesting that some dependent variables tended to produce consistency effects and others tended to produce enhancement effects. In particular, measures of certain cognitive processes (e.g., recall, perceptions of the self-descriptiveness of feedback) 1 seemed to support self-consistency theory.…”

Videotape reconstruction of emotions and cognitions related to shyness.

“…Because they tended to report less positive emotion, the data are not consistent with self-esteem notions, which claim that shy people are particularly happy about praise because of their high self-esteem needs (cf. Jones, 1973;Shrauger, 1975;Swann, 1985). The results also do not provide strong evidence for the contention of Arkin and Appelman (1983) and Lake and Arkin (1985) that shy people are likely to react to praise with ambivalent feelings involving both positive and negative emotions.…”

“…More elaborated views of the self-esteem notion postulate a self-enhancement effect of praise only for affective measures such as liking of the partner (cf. Shrauger, 1975;Swann, 1985). Thus, these views also predict more positive emotions among shy persons in response to praise.…”