Self-verification is a social psychological theory that asserts people want to be known and understood by others according to their firmly held beliefs and feelings about themselves,[1] that is self-views (including self-concepts and self-esteem).
Because chronic self-concepts and self-esteem play an important role in understanding the world, providing a sense of coherence, and guiding action, people become motivated to maintain them through self-verification.
Such strivings provide stability to people’s lives, making their experiences more coherent, orderly, and comprehensible than they would be otherwise.
Developed by William Swann (1981), the theory grew out of earlier writings which held that people form self-views so that they can understand and predict the responses of others and know how to act toward them.
For example, self-verification strivings may cause people with negative self-views to gravitate toward partners who mistreat them, undermine their feelings of self-worth, or even abuse them.
And if people with negative self-views seek therapy, returning home to a self-verifying partner may undo the progress that was made there.
[8] These findings and related ones point to the importance of efforts to improve the self-views of those who suffer from low self-esteem and depression.
[9] In one series of studies, researchers asked participants with positive and negative self-views whether they would prefer to interact with evaluators who had favorable or unfavorable impressions of them.
Men and women are equally inclined to display this tendency, and it does not matter whether the self-views refer to characteristics that are relatively immutable (e.g., intelligence) or changeable (e.g., diligence), or whether the self-views happen to be highly specific (e.g., athletic) or global (e.g., low self-esteem, worthlessness).
This tendency is especially pronounced when they start out believing that the other person has misconstrued them, apparently because people compensate by working especially hard to bring others to confirm their self-views.
This is not a viable option should our spouse suddenly begin treating us as if we were someone else, for such treatment would pose serious questions about the integrity of people's belief systems.
[23] People's self-verification strivings are apt to be most influential when the relevant identities and behaviors matter to them.
When these conditions are not met, people will be relatively unconcerned with preserving their self-views and they will instead indulge their desire for self-enhancement.
[24] But if people with firmly held negative self-views seek self-verification, this does not mean that they are masochistic or have no desire to be loved.
Although this imbalance is adaptive for society at large, it poses a challenge to researchers interested in studying self-verification.
[28] Critics have argued that self-verification processes are relatively rare, manifesting themselves only among people with terribly negative self views.
In support of this viewpoint, critics cite hundreds of studies indicating that people prefer, seek and value positive evaluations more than negative ones.
[32] Finally, in a study of people's thought processes as they chose interaction partners,[33] people with negative self-views indicated that they chose negative evaluators because such partners seemed likely to confirm their self-views (an epistemic consideration) and interact smoothly with them (a pragmatic consideration); self-improvement was rarely mentioned.