title: Affirming the self to promote agreement with another: lowering a psychological barrier to conflict resolution.
abstract: Two studies investigated the capacity of a self-affirmation intervention to lower a psychological barrier to conflict resolution. Study 1 used a role-play scenario in which a student negotiated with a professor for greater rewards for work on a collaborative project. A self-affirmation manipulation, in which participants focused on an important personal value, significantly reduced their tendency to derogate a concession offered by the professor relative to one that had not been offered. Study 2 replicated this effect and showed that the phenomenon did not depend on the self-affirmed participant's experience of a heightened sense of deservingness or a tendency to make positive attributions about the professor. Distraction and explicit mood enhancement were also ruled out as mediators of the self-affirmation effect, which appears to stem from motivational rather than explicit cognitive processes.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Swarthmore College, Swarthmore, PA 19081, USA. award1@swarthmore.edu
authors.forename: Andrew
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Ward
authors.forename: David C
authors.initials: DC
authors.lastname: Atkins
authors.forename: Mark R
authors.initials: MR
authors.lastname: Lepper
authors.forename: Lee
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Ross
mesh_terms: D003220:Conflict, Psychological; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D007398:Interpersonal Relations; D008297:Male; D017008:Negotiating / Q000523:psychology*; D011581:Psychological Tests; D012201:Reward; D012649:Self Concept; D012647:Self-Assessment