Search

This research investigated the hypothesis that intellectual competence is chronically accessible to individuals who question their own intellectual competence, despite their own uncertainty on this dimension, and that they rely on intellectual competence in forming impressions of and thinking about others. In two studies, we show that doubtful individuals are more likely to use traits related to intellectual competence to describe others and these traits more strongly affect their overall impressions of others. These findings support recent approaches to accessibility by showing that a self-relevant trait may be chronically accessible to an individual even in the face of uncertainty regarding one's standing on the trait. The findings also contribute to the understanding of the phenomenology of self-doubt.

The present research examines how self-concept clarity moderates the impact of feedback about one's self-knowledge. A preliminary study shows that individuals with higher clarity expect the process of defining who they are to be easier than those with lower clarity. Two experiments then test the effect of self-concept clarity on the experience of self-elaboration under conditions of either doubt or confidence. The results suggest that people with higher self-concept clarity show greater differences in self-evaluations based on whether their experience of describing the self is nested within ease and confidence or difficulty and doubt. We suggest that this effect may be a result of the different expectations high- and low-clarity individuals have for the task of describing the self.

The prevalence of entertainment media in everyday life might offer unexpected social opportunities. The present paper examined whether cognitive overlap with the character and self-expansion occur as a result of exposure to fictional characters. Results of two studies indicated that transportation into a narrative leads to greater cognitive overlap with the character and perceived self-expansion. Providing a distinction between these two concepts, we found that cognitive overlap with the character increases to the extent the character represents one's actual self-guide; perceived self-expansion increases to the extent the character represents one's ideal self-guide. Together, these findings illustrate the nature of parasocial relationships and impact of entertainment media on the self.

Four studies explored whether perceived implicit theories (Dweck, Chiu, & Hong, 1995) of others have the potential to engender self-doubt and influence one's self-attributions. Study 1 showed that people are aware of the attributional implications of evaluators' implicit theories. Study 2 showed that people can use social cues to detect evaluators' implicit theories. In Study 3, participants who believed that significant others endorsed an entity theory of intelligence exhibited greater self-doubt and made attributions for their own outcomes that were more stable (for negative events) and global (for negative and positive events). Finally, in Study 4, a manipulation of evaluators' implicit theories interacted with performance expectations to predict self-doubt about an upcoming evaluative situation. Compared to their counterparts with incremental evaluators, participants with entity evaluators reported greater self-doubt when they expected to do poorly and less self-doubt when they expected to do well. Di...