Self-Verification Motives at the Collective Level of Self-Definition.

Abstract

Three studies examined self-verification motives in relation to collective aspects of the self. Several moderators of collective self-verification were also examined-namely, the certainty with which collective self-views are held, the nature of one's ties to a source of self-verification, the salience of the collective self, and the importance of group identification. Evidence for collective self-verification emerged across all studies, particularly when collective self-views were held with high certainty (Studies 1 and 2), perceivers were somehow tied to the source of self-verification (Study 1), the collective self was salient (Study 2), and group identification was important (Study 3). To the authors' knowledge, these studies are the first to examine self-verification at the collective level of self-definition. The parallel and distinct ways in which self-verification processes may operate at different levels of self-definition are discussed.Who am I? In response to this question, research has shown that people refer not only to who they are as individuals (e.g., "I am clumsy"), but also to who they are in relation to other individuals (e.g., "I am a mother") and to social groups (e.g., "I am a Democrat"; see, e.g., Brewer & Gardner, 1996). Although cultural and other factors may influence the relative emphasis of these different self-aspects (e.g., Cousins, 1989;Rhee, Uleman, Lee, & Roman, 1995), it is widely believed that there are multiple possible levels of self-definition. Moreover, recent years have witnessed a rise in efforts to integrate work on different levels of self-definition into a single framework or to extend concepts formulated at one level to other ones (for a review, see Sedikides & Brewer, 2001). For instance, Brewer and Gardner (1996) offered a single theoretical framework encompassing three levels of self-definition: personal self, relational self, and collective self. As another example, the relational-self idea that people incorporate significant others into the self (Aron, Aron, Tudor, & Nelson, 1991) has been extended to the collective level in research showing that people incorporate in-group members into the self (Smith & Henry, 1996). A final example is work on collective self-esteem in which processes examined with regard to personal or individual self-esteem have been applied to the collective self (Crocker & Luhtanen, 1990).Joining this trend, the present research attempts to integrate theorizing and research on different levels of self-definition in a new domain. Specifically, our goal was to examine whether and in what ways self-verification motives (Swann, 1990), which have been examined only with respect to individual self-views, extend to collective self-views, guiding evaluation of the self as a member of a group or collective. Self and MotivationAn assumption shared by many social-psychological theories of the self is that people are driven to achieve and maintain a high level of self-esteem. As a group, they are often referred to as self-enhancement theories, because th...

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