Self-Affirmation Can Enable Goal Disengagement

Research indicates that affirming core values helps to bolster the legitimacy of the self and promotes reacting with equanimity to threats to self-regard. Self-affirmed people accept information about their personal flaws as credible and view those flaws as plausible causes of future problems. They have been shown to react to these humbling realizations by intending to bring the self in line with more virtuous standards (Sherman & Cohen, 2006). Thus, an open acknowledgment of one’s personal characteristics (perhaps especially one’s flaws) is central to how self-affirmation helps regulate goal-directed behavior. In contrast, we propose that engaging in self-affirmation can sometimes dampen performance and motivation. We predicted that compared to non-affirmed individuals, self-affirmed individuals will react to initial task failure with goal disengagement. In particular, because self-affirmation can increase openness to negative information about the self, we reasoned that being self-affirmed before failing at a task could lead individuals to take the negative feedback of failure more to heart, thus lowering their perceptions of self-efficacy. In turn, self-affirmed individuals who failed at an initial task might exert diminished effort and show reduced motivation on a subsequent task related to the same goal.