Abstract

In daily interactions, we face self-relevant information from our social environment that informs our self-concept. Despite extensive research across various disciplines, there is no consensus on the primary motivations influencing our self-views, with proposals diverging between the pursuit of positive self-images and the need for a stable self-concept. Understanding self-concept dynamics is crucial given its generalized impact in our well-being. However, how we integrate information into our self-representations to promote a positively biased, yet progressively stable self-concept is a question that remains unanswered. In a series of 4 experiments (Experiment 1, n= 33; 2, n= 40; Experiment 3, n= 45; Experiment 4, n= 40), we combined a sentence verification task (Experiments 2-4) with a belief updating task to investigate how participants integrate social feedback depending on its valence and selfcongruence. Experiment 1 indicated that the lack of control of an initial positive bias in participants self-concept might have masked valence and congruence effects in recent works. After implementing methodological adjustments (Experiments 2-3) our results suggested that the integration of social feedback was strongly driven by feedback self-congruence and moderately driven by feedback valence. Importantly, both effects showed to be enduring after 24 hours (Experiment 3) and self-specific (Experiment 4). By synthesizing insights from social, personality, and cognitive psychology, this study offers a nuanced understanding of selfconcept dynamics during social feedback processing. Our conceptual and methodological advancements have implications for understanding the link between structural and affective components of self-concept and offer a new lens for reinterpreting previous empirical studies.