Geoffrey L. Cohen

THE PSYCHOLOGY OF SELF-DEFENSE: SELF-AFFIRMATION THEORY

In major league baseball, a hitter could have a long and productive career by maintaining a .300 average, that is, by getting a base hit 30% of the time. A great deal of money could be earned and fame accrued. Yet the other 70% of the time, this player would have failed. The vast majority of attempts to hit the ball would result in ‘‘making an out’’ and thus pose a potential threat to the player’s sense of personal worth and social regard. Like major league baseball players, people in contemporary society face innumerable failures and self‐threats. These include substandard performance on the job or in class, frustrated goals or aspirations, information challenging the validity of long‐held beliefs, illness, the defeat of one’s political party in an election or of one’s favorite sports team in a playoV, scientific evidence suggesting that one is engaging in risky health behavior, negative feedback at work or in school, rejection in a romantic relationship, real and perceived social slights, interpersonal and intergroup conflict, the misbehavior of one’s child, the loss of a loved one, and so on. In the course of a given day, the potential number of events that could threaten people’s ‘‘moral and adaptive adequacy’’—their sense of themselves as good, virtuous, successful, and able to control important life outcomes (Steele, 1988)—seems limitless and likely to exceed the small number of events that aYrm it. A major undertaking for most people is to sustain self‐integrity when faced with the inevitable setbacks and disappointments of daily life—the 70% of the time 183

A Question of Belonging: Race, Social Fit, and Achievement

Stigmatization can give rise to belonging uncertainty. In this state, people are sensitive to information diagnostic of the quality of their social connections. Two experiments tested how belonging uncertainty undermines the motivation and achievement of people whose group is negatively characterized in academic settings. In Experiment 1, students were led to believe that they might have few friends in an intellectual domain. Whereas White students were unaffected, Black students (stigmatized in academics) displayed a drop in their sense of belonging and potential. In Experiment 2, an intervention that mitigated doubts about social belonging in college raised the academic achievement (e.g., college grades) of Black students but not of White students. Implications for theories of achievement motivation and intervention are discussed.

Reducing the Racial Achievement Gap: A Social-Psychological Intervention

Two randomized field experiments tested a social-psychological intervention designed to improve minority student performance and increase our understanding of how psychological threat mediates performance in chronically evaluative real-world environments. We expected that the risk of confirming a negative stereotype aimed at ones group could undermine academic performance in minority students by elevating their level of psychological threat. We tested whether such psychological threat could be lessened by having students reaffirm their sense of personal adequacy or “self-integrity.” The intervention, a brief in-class writing assignment, significantly improved the grades of African American students and reduced the racial achievement gap by 40%. These results suggest that the racial achievement gap, a major social concern in the United States, could be ameliorated by the use of timely and targeted social-psychological interventions.

A brief social-belonging intervention improves academic and health outcomes of minority students.

Reducing feelings of social exclusion yields lasting improvements in academic performance and health in college students. A brief intervention aimed at buttressing college freshmen’s sense of social belonging in school was tested in a randomized controlled trial (N = 92), and its academic and health-related consequences over 3 years are reported. The intervention aimed to lessen psychological perceptions of threat on campus by framing social adversity as common and transient. It used subtle attitude-change strategies to lead participants to self-generate the intervention message. The intervention was expected to be particularly beneficial to African-American students (N = 49), a stereotyped and socially marginalized group in academics, and less so to European-American students (N = 43). Consistent with these expectations, over the 3-year observation period the intervention raised African Americans’ grade-point average (GPA) relative to multiple control groups and halved the minority achievement gap. This performance boost was mediated by the effect of the intervention on subjective construal: It prevented students from seeing adversity on campus as an indictment of their belonging. Additionally, the intervention improved African Americans’ self-reported health and well-being and reduced their reported number of doctor visits 3 years postintervention. Senior-year surveys indicated no awareness among participants of the intervention’s impact. The results suggest that social belonging is a psychological lever where targeted intervention can have broad consequences that lessen inequalities in achievement and health.

When Beliefs Yield to Evidence: Reducing Biased Evaluation by Affirming the Self

People often cling to beliefs even in the face of disconfirming evidence and interpret ambiguous information in a manner that bolsters strongly held attitudes. The authors tested a motivational account suggesting that these defensive reactions would be ameliorated by an affirmation of an alternative source of self-worth. Consistent with this interpretation, participants were more persuaded by evidence impugning their views toward capital punishment when they were self-affirmed than when they were not (Studies 1 and 2). Affirmed participants also proved more critical of an advocate whose arguments confirmed their views on abortion and less confident in their own attitudes regarding that issue than did unaffirmed participants (Study 3). Results suggest that assimilation bias and resistance to persuasion are mediated, in part, by identity-maintenance motivations.

Reducing the Gender Achievement Gap in College Science: A Classroom Study of Values Affirmation

Writing to Close Gaps Some have questioned whether findings in the laboratory obtained under controlled conditions and limited contexts bear any relevance to behavior in real-world environments in which ordinary people cope with real-life challenges. Recent studies have shown a replicable and long-term effect of a brief writing exercise on the academic performance of African-American seventh graders in an inner-city public school. Miyake et al. (p. 1234) extended this approach to show that a similar kind of writing exercise can help to reduce the gender gap observed in the performance of female students in an undergraduate physics class, where performance is measured not only via course grades and exam scores, but also on a standardized test. A writing exercise improves the performance of female physics students. In many science, technology, engineering, and mathematics disciplines, women are outperformed by men in test scores, jeopardizing their success in science-oriented courses and careers. The current study tested the effectiveness of a psychological intervention, called values affirmation, in reducing the gender achievement gap in a college-level introductory physics class. In this randomized double-blind study, 399 students either wrote about their most important values or not, twice at the beginning of the 15-week course. Values affirmation reduced the male-female performance and learning difference substantially and elevated womens modal grades from the C to B range. Benefits were strongest for women who tended to endorse the stereotype that men do better than women in physics. A brief psychological intervention may be a promising way to address the gender gap in science performance and learning.

The Psychology of Change: Self-Affirmation and Social Psychological Intervention

People have a basic need to maintain the integrity of the self, a global sense of personal adequacy. Events that threaten self-integrity arouse stress and self-protective defenses that can hamper performance and growth. However, an intervention known as self-affirmation can curb these negative outcomes. Self-affirmation interventions typically have people write about core personal values. The interventions bring about a more expansive view of the self and its resources, weakening the implications of a threat for personal integrity. Timely affirmations have been shown to improve education, health, and relationship outcomes, with benefits that sometimes persist for months and years. Like other interventions and experiences, self-affirmations can have lasting benefits when they touch off a cycle of adaptive potential, a positive feedback loop between the self-system and the social system that propagates adaptive outcomes over time. The present review highlights both connections with other disciplines and lessons for a social psychological understanding of intervention and change.

The Mentor’s Dilemma: Providing Critical Feedback Across the Racial Divide

Two studies examined the response of Black and White students to critical feedback presented either alone or buffered with additional information to ameliorate its negative effects. Black students who received unbuffered critical feedback responded less favorably than White students both in ratings of the evaluator’s bias and in measures of task motivation. By contrast, when the feedback was accompanied both by an invocation of high standards and by an assurance of the student’s capacity to reach those standards, Black students responded as positively as White students and both groups reported enhanced identification with relevant skills and careers. This “wise,” two-faceted intervention proved more effective than buffering criticism either with performance praise (Study 1) or with an invocation of high standards alone (Study 2). The role of stigma in mediating responses to critical feedback, and the implications of our results for mentoring and other teacher-student interactions, are explored.

Accepting Threatening Information: Self–Affirmation and the Reduction of Defensive Biases

Why do people resist evidence that challenges the validity of long–held beliefs? And why do they persist in maladaptive behavior even when persuasive information or personal experience recommends change? We argue that such defensive tendencies are driven, in large part, by a fundamental motivation to protect the perceived worth and integrity of the self. Studies of social–political debate, health–risk assessment, and responses to team victory or defeat have shown that people respond to information in a less defensive and more open–minded manner when their self–worth is buttressed by an affirmation of an alternative source of identity. Self–affirmed individuals are more likely to accept information that they would otherwise view as threatening, and subsequently to change their beliefs and even their behavior in a desirable fashion. Defensive biases have an adaptive function for maintaining self–worth, but maladaptive consequences for promoting change and reducing social conflict.

I Am Us: Negative Stereotypes as Collective Threats

Collective threat is the fear that an in-group members behavior might reinforce a negative stereotype of ones group. In a field study, self-reported collective threat was higher in stereotyped minorities than in Whites and was linked to lower self-esteem in both groups. In 3 experimental studies, a potentially poor performance by an in-group member on a stereotype-relevant task proved threatening, as evidenced by lower self-esteem among minority students in 2 experiments and women in a 3rd experiment. The latter study demonstrated the generality of collective threat. Collective threat also undermined academic performance and affected self-stereotyping, stereotype activation, and physical distancing from the in-group member. Results further suggest that group identification plays a role in whether people use an avoidance or challenge strategy in coping with collective threat. Implications for theories of social identity and stigmatization are discussed.