Self-Affirmations Provide a Broader Perspective on Self-Threat

We present an “affirmation as perspective” model of how self-affirmations alleviate threat and defensiveness. self-threats dominate the working self-concept,leading to a constricted self disproportionately influenced by the threat. self-affirmations expand the size of the working self-concept,offering a broader perspective in which the threat appears more narrow and self-worth realigns with broader dispositional self-views (experiment 1). self-affirmed participants,relative to those not affirmed,indicated that threatened self-aspects were less all-defining of the self (although just as important),and this broader perspective on the threat mediated self-affirmation’s reduction of defensiveness (experiment 2). finally,having participants complete a simple perspective exercise,which offered a broader perspective on the self without prompting affirmational thinking (experiment 3a),reduced defensiveness in a manner equivalent to and redundant with a standard self-affirmation manipulation (experiment 3b). the present model offers a unifying account for a wide variety of seemingly unrelated findings and mysteries in the self-affirmation literature. © 2014 by the society for personality and social psychology,inc.