THE INTERPERSONAL DYNAMICS OF SELF-CONCEPT STABILITY

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This is a request for continuing support for research concerned with the dynamic interplay between people's social beliefs and the interpersonal environments in which they are embedded. The program of research assumes that most prior conceptualizations of person perception (those processes by which people form beliefs about themselves and others) are inadequate because they overemphasize the cognitive mediators of the process. The proposed research rests on a broader conceptualization which assumes that person perception is a fundamentally interpersonal process that ordinarily serves to enable people to establish and maintain smoothly functioning relationships. Part I attempts to identify interpersonal mechanisms that interfere with the efforts of therapists to change negative self-views. Attempts are made to test the hypothesis that under certain conditions individuals: (a) enter relationships in which they receive negative feedback; (b) interpret feedback in ways that are compatible with their negative self-views; and (c) make frequent and incompetent attempts to elicit positive feedback, to which their friends, intimates, and even therapists respond with ambivalence and rejection. Part II examines the processes that underlie people's behavioral and cognitive reactions to feedback that disconfirms their self-conceptions. Experiments are designed to identify the conditions under which people are likely to: (a) behaviorally confirm versus disconfirm the beliefs of others; (b) have their intimates support their self-conceptions when these conceptions are under attack; and (c) enter into and remain in relationships in which their intimates perceive them inaccurately. Studies are also proposed to specify processes that diminish the probability that people receive self-discrepant feedback. Part III explores the notion that if people's actions constrain the responses of their interaction partners (as I expect to find in Parts I and II), then it is important to learn when and how people become aware of this constraining influence. Several investigations attempt to identify the psychological processes that underlie such awareness as well as the relationship between awareness and interpersonal conflict. At a general level, this research is intended to result in the development of a truly interpersonal theory of person perception that acknowledges the dynamic interplay between social thought and social action.