Whereas most self-verification research has focused on people’s
desire to verify their global self-conceptions, the present studies
examined self-verification with regard to contextualized selfviews—
views of the self in particular situations and relationships.
It was hypothesized that individuals whose core
self-conceptions include contextualized self-views should seek to
verify these self-views. In Study 1, the more individuals defined
the self in dialectical terms, the more their judgments were
biased in favor of verifying over nonverifying feedback about a
negative, situation-specific self-view. In Study 2, consistent
with research on gender differences in the importance of relationships
to the self-concept, women but not men showed a similar
bias toward feedback about a negative, relationship-specific
self-view, a pattern not seen for global self-views. Together, the
results support the notion that self-verification occurs for core
self-conceptions, whatever form(s) they may take. Individual
differences in self-verification and the nature of selfhood and
authenticity are discussed.
Keywords: self-verification; contextualized self-views; individual
differences; authenticity; relational self