The Intrinsic Self and Defensiveness: Evidence that Activating the Intrinsic Self Reduces Self-Handicapping and Conformity
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Two studies were conducted to assess the hypothesis that shifting individuals’ base of self-esteem to more stable, intrinsic self-attributes would reduce psychological defensiveness in the form of self-handicapping attributions and conformity. In Study 1, participants visualized an individual who liked them contingently or noncontingently, or who was neutral toward them, and then made attributions for an impending test performance. Participants who visualized the noncontingently accepting other made fewer self-handicapping attributions. In Study 2, partici pants wrote about an intrinsic self-attribute, an achievement, or a neutral event and then evaluated several abstract art paintings while knowing how other participants purportedly rated the paintings. Participants for whom the intrinsic self was primed conformed less to others’ judgments relative to achievement self-primed and control participants. Discussion focuses on the implications of these findings for understanding the connection between self-esteem and defensiveness.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".