People often react defensively when they are faced with personal feedback and messages that challenge positive beliefs about themselves. To illustrate, smokers endorse a variety of myths that allow them to rationalize their smoking behavior, and people receiving negative feedback about their performance use many strategies to reduce the credibility or personal relevance of the feedback. However, people are less likely to show such defensiveness when they have an opportunity to reflect on their personal values in advance, an act of self-affirmation. The purpose of this grant is to explore a set of physiological, cognitive, and motivational processes that can account for the beneficial effects of self-affirmation. The first two experiments examine effects of self-affirmation on adaptive physiological responses to threat such as reduced heart rate and cortisol response. Five additional experiments explore cognitive effects such as unconscious attention to threatening stimuli, the ability to extract the "gist" of a threatening message, the determination to allocate attention to threat when competing demands are present, and the tendency to generate and test more even-handed hypotheses (e.g., "perhaps I do eat too much fat"). Finally, two experiments look at motivational effects, particularly the extent to which self-affirmation makes people more receptive to opportunities they might have to enact behavioral change. In addition, these investigations look at whether self-affirmation closes the oft-documented gap between people's resolutions to change behavior and their actual behavior change.
Together, these experiments follow the sequence from self-affirmation to behavioral outcomes, helping to elucidate why self-affirmation reduces defensiveness. Thus, the findings will advance self-affirmation theory as well as related theories of the self. Moreover, the findings will help in the development of interventions that succeed in sidestepping defensive reactions in such wide-ranging domains as health, performance evaluation, education, and interpersonal relationships. Finally, the project features an international collaboration between investigators in the United States and United Kingdom, providing unique educational opportunities for the students involved with the project as well as taking advantage of the unique expertise in the United Kingdom on the interplay between social processes and health outcomes.
