Affirming the self to promote agreement with another: Lowering a psychological barrier to conflict resolution

Two studies investigated the capacity of a self-affirmation intervention to lower a psychological barrier to conflict resolution. study 1 used a role-play scenario in which a student negotiated with a professor for greater rewards for work on a collaborative project. a self-affirmation manipulation,in which participants focused on an important personal value,significantly reduced their tendency to derogate a concession offered by the professor relative to one that had not been offered. study 2 replicated this effect and showed that the phenomenon did not depend on the self-affirmed participant's experience of a heightened sense of deservingness or a tendency to make positive attributions about the professor. distraction and explicit mood enhancement were also ruled out as mediators of the self-affirmation effect,which appears to stem from motivational rather than explicit cognitive processes. © 2011 by the society for personality and social psychology,inc.