Self-assessment

In social psychology, self-assessment is the process of looking at oneself in order to assess aspects that are important to one's identity.

Unlike the other two motives, through self-assessment people are interested in the accuracy of their current self view, rather than improving their self-view.

[1] The first experiment conducted the results showed that when choosing what questions they wanted to be asked they were more likely to request those that would verify their self-concept rather than assess it.

[1] In experiment four Sedikides suggests that the reason past experiments have not supported self-assessment is because participants reflect more on the central traits than peripheral traits, which are generally ones that are assessed so as to be able to improve at the same time as not harming the self-concept too much.

The authors then conducted one final experiment looking at the validation of self-enhancement when reflecting on the self.

This research found that participants were more likely to choose to take part in tasks that were higher in accuracy about their characteristics.

The last area of self-assessment Sedikides and Strube[2] reviewed was whether participants would want to construct highly or less accurate tasks and if participants would be more persistent or more likely to succeed if they were taking part in highly or less accurate tasks.

Self-assessment is a difficult motive to assess, as discovered by Sedikides[1] but it is important to self-evaluation as it means that people are able to realize ways in which to improve themselves.