The Effect Of Self-distance On Self-confidence

Self-distance means one distance oneself from it’s thoughts, feeling or experience, and it refers to a process that allows people to transcend their egocentric viewpoint. There are two types of cognitive perspective according to the relationship between “I” and “me”, one is self-distanced perspective and the other is self-immersed perspective. Self-distanced perspective means people view themselves as an observer of the self. In contrast, self-immersed perspective means people view themselves from their own eyes. The preference and extent of using two types of perspective for everyone is different in daily life. High tendency of self-distance means using less self-immersed perspective and more self-distanced perspective when one consider himself.Self-distancing is good for people to consider themselves, because it can make people more dispassionate and more rational. What’s more, self-distancing could expand ones’ horizons when people consider the target stimulus. Thus, self-distancing is beneficial to develop good personality.Self-confidence is a good personality character. It is a real and important need for people to obtain the self-confidence through reasonable evaluation. Self-confidence is influenced by many factors, and the individual’s cognitive style should not be ignored. Self-distancing could influence self-confidence through affecting the organizational structure of self-confidence. What’s more,self-distancing is a process that working on the self-information, so it could provide specific information as a support when people judge their self-confidence.This paper presented two studies to explore the relationship between self-distance and self-confidence. The first study used questionnaires method to test the relationship among self-distance, self-clarity and self-confidence. The second study used experimental method to examine the effect of self-distance on self-confidence. In second study, two experiments were designed to explore the effect of self-distance on self-confidence. In the first experiment, the feeling of difficulty and the self-distancing is primed at the same time, while the self-distancing is primed after the feeling of difficulty in the second experiment.Conclusions:(1)Correlation analysis showed significantly positive correlation between self-distance and self-confidence. In addition, clarity partially mediated the relationship between self-distance and self-confidence.(2)When the feeling of difficulty and the self-distancing was primed at the same time, the feeling of difficulty would not influence self-confidence, but the self-distancing still presented a main effect on self-confidence. Compared to self-immersed perspective group, self-distanced perspective group had higher level of self-confidence.(3)When the self-distancing was primed after the feeling of difficulty, there would be a interaction effect on self-confidence. In simple task, there was no significant difference between the self-distanced perspective group and self-immersed group. In difficulty task, the confidence of self-immersed perspective group was lower than the self-distanced group.In general, results indicated that self-distance could influence self-confidence. Self-distancing was better for self-confidence than self-immersing when face low self-confidence clues like the feeling of difficulty. It was good for self-confidence whenever priming self-distancing, but the mechanism was different at the different stage.