An Experimental Research On Different Self-affirmation Method Reducing Defensive Responses

Life is full nine times out of ten, external events and information may be potential threats to the selves of individuals, in order to maintain positive self evaluation, individuals console themselves by emphasizing their advantages of A aspect to remedy short comes of B aspect, namely self-affirmation. Self-affirmation is when one feels threatened, he or she affirms important self-value unrelated to the threat domain to maintain self integrity which can defined as the sense that, on the whole, one think he’s good, moral and adaptive. Lots of researches on western people show that self-affirmation could reduce one’s defensive responses, make one see oneself with a broader view and process threatening information in a more objective and unbiased way. As for Chinese who has quite a different self structure, however, their characteristics of self-affirmation process is little known.Chinese also have self-affirmation phenomenon, yet whether self evaluation of independent self system and that of interdependent self system function independently or influence each other, is still a question. Based on the double self system of Chinese, the realization of self-affirmation could be divided into two ways by which part of resource it invokes:the independent self-affirmation and the interdependent self-affirmation. Previous researches show that self-affirmation within each self system is effective:using each system’s resource for affirmation can reduce threat to each system respectively, but is seems that crossover situation would not work, for affirming resources from independent self couldn’t reduce threats to interdependent self. Could affirmation of interdependent self aspect assuage threats to independent self, and reduce defensive responses? Comparing with independent self-affirmation, is the effectiveness of interdependent self-affirmation bigger or smaller? These are the two issues our research intends to discuss.Our research designed two experiments according to the double self system of Chinese, using self handicapping tendency as indicator of defensive responses, compared effectiveness of independent self-affirmation, interdependent self-affirmation on reducing defensiveness. In Experiment 1,66 Chinese participants randomly assigned to three groups:independent self-affirmation group, interdependent self-affirmation group and the control group. Participants first complete a set of Revan reasoning test, evaluate its difficulty and estimate their performance. They take a break and fill the self-affirmation manipulation questionnaires:affirming two abilities they’re proud of, or affirming relationships with important close person they value, or describing food taking details in the past 24 hours. Then present 5 types of music and ask participants to choose one to listen to while doing the second reasoning test that would come next, the type of music which is said to impede intelligence performance more means the participant has a stronger tendency of handicapping. Then participants complete the second test and evaluate its difficulty and estimate their performance. The results showed that people in interdependent self-affirmation group chose music that facilitate intelligence performance more, their self handicapping tendency are the lowest, independent self-affirmation group exerted adverse effect because of "same domain effect", they chose music that impede intelligence performance more and showed the highest level of self handicapping tendency.The major purpose of Experiment 2 was to exam whether the adjusted experimental conditions could replicate the results of Experiment 1. all together 64 participants completed the experiment, using same paradigm which Experiment 1 take but adjusted the manipulation detail of independent self-affirmation and a different dependent variable indicator. After self-affirmation manipulation, participant freely choose one set of reasoning test out of 5 sets of tests with different difficulty, the more difficult the test one choose means the stronger tendency of self-handicapping. The results showed that participants in interdependent self-affirmation and independent self-affirmation groups chose tests which are less difficult more, had significant lower level of self-handicapping tendency, while participants in control group chose difficult tests more.Based on the results from current experimental conditions, we obtain two major conclusions as follows:(1) Confronted with ability threats, the independent self and interdependent self aspects are important resources for self-affirmation, could effectively reduce individuals self-handicapping tendency.(2) In general, the effectiveness of reducing self-handicapping tendency of interdependent self-affirmation is not smaller than independent self-affirmation.