Self-assessment

In social psychology, self-assessment is the process of looking at oneself in order to assess aspects that are important to one's identity. It is one of the motives that drive self-evaluation, along with self-verification and self-enhancement. Sedikides (1993) suggests that the self-assessment motive will prompt people to seek information to confirm their uncertain self-concept rather than their certain self-concept and at the same time people use self-assessment to enhance their certainty of their own self-knowledge. However, the self-assessment motive could be seen as quite different from the other two self-evaluation motives. Unlike the other two motives through self-assessment people are interested in the accuracy of their current self view, rather than improving their self-view. This makes self-assessment the only self-evaluative motive that may cause a person's self-esteem to be damaged.

If through self-assessing there is a possibility that a person's self-concept, or self-esteem is going to be damaged why would this be a motive of self-evaluation, surely it would be better to only self-verify and self-enhance and not to risk damaging self-esteem? Trope in his paper "Self-Enhancement and Self Assessment in Achievement Behaviour" suggests that self-assessment is a way in which self-esteem can be enhanced in the future. For example, self-assessment may mean that in the short-term self-assessment may cause harm to a person's self-concept through realising that they may not have achieved as highly as they may like; however in the long term this may mean that they work harder in order to achieve greater things in the future, and as a result their self-esteem would be enhanced further than where it had been before self-assessment.

Within the self-evaluation motives however there are some interesting interactions. Self-assessment is found a lot of the time to be associated with self-enhancement as the two motives seem to contradict each other with opposing aims; whereas the motive to self-assess sees it as important to ensure that the self-concept is accurate the motive to self-enhance sees it as important to boost the self-concept in order to protect it from any negative feedback.

In 1993, Constantine Sedikides performed an experiment investigating the roles of each of the self-evaluation motives, investigated if one was stronger and held more weight than others and tried to draw out specifically the self-assessment and self-verification motives. The first experiment conducted the results showed that when choosing what questions they wanted to be asked they were more likely to request those that would verify their self-concept rather than assess it. This finding supports the idea that certain traits are more central to a person's self-concept, however shows little support for the self-assessment motive. When considering the interaction between how strong and how central certain traits are to a person's self-concept Sedikides again found evidence in support of the self-verification and self-enhancement motives, though again none for the self-assessment motive.

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