The Research Of Chinese Self-verification At Relational Level

On the basis of symbolic interactionism theory and self-consistency theory, Swann proposed self-verification theory which described people’s motive of seeking feedbacks in accord with existing and firm self-concepts to predict and control their behaviors. After the proposition, so many scholars devoted themselves to relevant researches, so the focuses of them has extended to self-concepts at relational level and collective level, not only individual self-concepts. Meanwhile, the theory is perfected because we can conclude that, no matter what level the self-concept is at, if only the self-concept is important enough to subjects they will verify it. So we predict that Chinese people will verify their relational self-concepts and the reason is they value relationships and their relational selves to maintain the relations. Our research focuses on Chinese self-verification motive in relationships, and we inquire into the factors influencing the motive like intimacy of relationships and the certainty of self-concepts.Research1is a2X2between-group design. The independent variables are types of self and feedback information while the dependent variable is subjects’cognitive evaluation for feedback information. We include not only self-concepts at relational level but also self-concepts at global level, considering that we can contrast results of the two groups. We design the research like this with two reasons:proving that Chinese verify their relational self and comparing the global results with former researches.10words of personality trait were applied to test who hold passive self-concepts, then the one would our experimental subject. When subjects came to lab, they were required to complete some tests involving an esteem test, a personality test and so on, after that they were presented fake feedback information and they needed to judge them. If they deem consistent information are more exact than inconsistent information, the subjects were considered to verify their self-views. The result is Chinese verify not only their relational self but also their global self. We designed a2X2mixed experiment in research2. The independent variables are intimacy of relationships and certainty of self-views, while the dependent variable is self-verification index. Research1had shown self-verification exists at both global and relational level, but we just concerned the later. The former scholars in west had told us that certainty of self-views could enhance self-verification effect for any type of self like global, relational or collective. On the other hand, in intimate relationships, when significant other’representation are activated self-verification for relational self is automatically invoked, so we guessed that intimacy would be another important factor. In light of this, we further inquired how intimacy and certainty influence relational self-verification motive. Any person could be our subject, he/she must give how intimate their relationship, then evaluate himself/herself and he/she expected how the other one in the relationship regard him/her; of course, he/she also needed to finish the personality similar to research1. At last, we found intimacy indeed promotes individuals to seek self-verification even if certainty puts no impact on self-verification.