Danger of Self Affirmation
What sets individuals apart is their ambivalence about praise and acceptance. Although positive evaluations initially foster joy and warmth, these feelings can later become chilled by incredulity, they are hard to believe.
It is easy to see how self-verification strivings might be adaptive for the majority of people. Roughly 70% of people have positive self-views. For them, self-verification strivings bring stability to their lives. Their experiences are more coherent, orderly, and comprehensible than they would otherwise. Such coherence and predictability may not only enable people to achieve their relationship goals of raising children and coordinating careers. It may be found psychologically comforting and anxiety reducing.
When people strive to verify inappropriately negative self-views, that is, self-views that exaggerate or misrepresent their limitations, wrongly thinking they’re fat or dumb. They may consign themselves to punishing life situations or needlessly foreclose highly
desirable life possibilities.
For those who develop erroneous negative self-views, it is important to work to disrupt the self-verifying cycles in which they are often trapped.
William B. Swann, Jr.
Psychology Today
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