Selective Integration of Social Feedback Promotes a Stable and Positively Biased Self-Concept.

Abstract

Understanding self-concept dynamics is crucial given its generalized impact on our well-being. However, how we integrate information into our self-representations to promote a positively biased, yet progressively stable self-concept is a question that remains unanswered. In a series of four experiments, we refined a belief updating task to investigate how participants integrate social feedback depending on its valence and self-congruence. Experiment 1 indicated that the lack of control of an initial positive bias in participants self-concept might have masked valence and congruence effects in recent works. After implementing methodological adjustments (Experiments 2 and 3) we found that the integration of social feedback was strongly driven by feedback self-congruence and moderately driven by feedback valence. By synthesizing insights from social, personality, and cognitive psychology, this study advances the understanding of self-concept dynamics during social feedback processing. Our conceptual and methodological advancements offer a new lens for reinterpreting previous findings.