ABSTRACT

People are motivated to acquire self-evaluative information that favours themselves (self-enhancement) or information that confirms their present self-views (self-consistency). We proposed that participants' naïve theories characterising self-esteem as important may moderate their self-enhancement motivations. Across three samples, we demonstrated that increasing self-esteem importance causes prevention-based emotional reactions to become increasingly dependent on the favorability of feedback. We thus infer that self-enhancement motivation increases when people hold favourable beliefs about the importance of maximising self-esteem. We also replicated past findings in which people regard positive (versus negative) self-relevant information as more valid when they have high (versus low) self-esteem, revealing self-consistency. Individual differences in self-esteem importance and trait self-esteem thus play distinct roles in shaping people’s enhancement and consistency motivations.

摘要

人们有动力获得有利于自己的自我评价信息（自我提升）或确认他们目前的自我观点的信息（自我一致性））。我们提出，参与者将自尊描述为重要的幼稚理论可能会调节他们的自我提升动机。在三个样本中，我们证明了自尊重要性的增加会导致基于预防的情绪反应越来越依赖于反馈的好感。因此我们推断，当人们对最大化自尊的重要性持有有利的信念时，自我提升的动机会增加。我们还重复了过去的研究结果，其中人们认为当他们具有高（相对于低）自尊时，积极（相对于消极）的自我相关信息更有效，揭示了自我一致性。自尊重要性和特质自尊的个体差异因此在塑造人们的增强和一致性动机方面发挥着不同的作用。