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 machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".