The research behind Self-Concept Clarity
Most of us could describe ourselves if someone asked. We have a collection of beliefs about our personality, values, abilities, preferences and the kind of person we think we are.
Psychologists call this our self-concept.
But researchers have found that there is another question worth asking. It isn't only what you believe about yourself. It is how clear and certain those beliefs are in the first place.
Psychologist Jennifer Campbell began studying this distinction in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Her work eventually led to the concept of Self-Concept Clarity, which describes the extent to which someone's beliefs about themselves are clearly defined, internally consistent and relatively stable over time.
In other words, two people can have equally complicated personalities while differing considerably in how clearly they understand them.
THE EXPERIMENT
In a series of studies published in 1990, Campbell investigated whether people differed in the clarity and certainty of their self-knowledge.
Participants were asked to evaluate themselves on opposing personality traits. They might have to decide whether they were more introverted or extroverted, for example, or whether a particular characteristic felt like "me" or "not me."
Campbell wasn't only interested in which traits people selected. She looked at how confidently they made those judgments, how consistent their answers were and, in one study, how long it took them to decide whether traits described them.
The researchers also returned to participants two months later and asked them to describe themselves again.
The results suggested meaningful differences in how people's self-concepts were organized. Participants with lower self-esteem tended to be less certain about their self-descriptions, showed less consistency in their responses and changed their trait ratings more across the two-month period. They also took longer to make some judgments about whether particular traits described them.
Campbell's later work with colleagues expanded the idea beyond self-esteem and formally defined Self-Concept Clarity as a characteristic of the self-concept in its own right.
They developed a 12-item scale designed to measure it and tested whether the scale corresponded with other indicators of having a clear and stable sense of self.
It did.
People scoring higher in self-concept clarity tended to give self-descriptions that were more stable and internally consistent. Lower clarity was also associated with greater chronic self-analysis and more ruminative forms of self-focused attention.
THE FINDING
One of the interesting implications of this research is that thinking about yourself a lot is not necessarily the same thing as knowing yourself well.
Someone can spend considerable time analyzing their personality, decisions and reactions while still feeling uncertain about what those observations add up to.
That distinction is easy to miss.
We often assume that introspection automatically produces self-knowledge. Sometimes it does. But repeatedly reconsidering who you are can also leave the picture less settled, particularly when each new situation causes you to revise your interpretation of yourself.
Self-concept clarity is therefore less about having a simple personality than having a reasonably coherent understanding of a complicated one.
You can be ambitious and still value a slow life. You can be sociable and need substantial time alone. You can be confident professionally and uncertain romantically.
Those characteristics don't necessarily contradict each other.
Clarity means you have a framework that allows them to coexist.
THE THEORY
Campbell and her colleagues defined self-concept clarity around three characteristics: clarity, internal consistency and stability.
Clarity means that your beliefs about yourself feel reasonably well defined. If someone asks what matters to you, what you're good at or what kind of person you are, you have some idea.
Internal consistency means those beliefs fit together in a way that makes sense to you. This doesn't require behaving identically everywhere. Most people act somewhat differently with a close friend than they do in a job interview. The question is whether those different versions still feel understandable as parts of the same person.
Stability refers to whether your basic understanding of yourself persists reasonably well over time rather than changing dramatically in response to every new experience or piece of information.
This doesn't mean a clear self-concept never changes. It should change. People learn, mature, change environments and discover things about themselves.
The difference is between updating your understanding of yourself and continually having to reconstruct it.
NOT THE SAME THING
Self-concept clarity is not self-esteem
This was one of the distinctions Campbell's research was designed to make.
Self-esteem concerns how positively you evaluate yourself.
Self-concept clarity concerns how clearly you understand yourself.
The two are related, but they aren't interchangeable.
You could have a very clear understanding of a characteristic you don't particularly like. Equally, someone might generally think highly of themselves while still being uncertain about their values, preferences or identity.
Knowing who you are and liking who you are are different psychological questions.
There is also an important cultural qualification. In Campbell and colleagues' 1996 research, Japanese participants showed lower average self-concept clarity than Canadian participants and the relationship between clarity and self-esteem was weaker. The researchers cautioned that the Western emphasis on a stable, internally consistent individual self may not operate identically across cultures.
So greater clarity shouldn't automatically be interpreted as having a "better" personality.
It describes how self-knowledge is organized.
WHY IT MATTERS
Later experimental research offers an interesting clue about why clarity might matter in everyday life.
In two experiments involving more than 200 participants, researchers examined how people with different levels of self-concept clarity responded to positive and negative information about themselves.
People with lower self-concept clarity were more affected by the information they received. Their self-esteem, emotions and even subsequent self-promoting behavior shifted depending on whether the feedback was favorable or unfavorable.
Participants with higher self-concept clarity were comparatively less affected.
That makes intuitive sense.
If you aren't particularly sure what you think about yourself, other people provide useful information.
A compliment can temporarily settle the question in one direction. Criticism can settle it in another. Being wanted, rejected, praised, ignored or compared with someone else can carry more information because your own answer is less established.
A clearer self-concept doesn't make someone immune to feedback. Nor should it. Other people occasionally see things about us that we don't.
But feedback becomes information to consider rather than information that has to define you.
TRY THIS
Pick one area of yourself you have been uncertain about recently.
Instead of asking whether you are good enough, successful enough, interesting enough or anything else that requires an evaluation, remove the judgment for a moment.
Ask yourself what you actually know.
What do you consistently enjoy? What drains you? What matters enough that you repeatedly protect it? What kinds of environments bring out particular sides of you? What have you learned about the way you make decisions? Which characteristics have remained recognizable across different periods of your life?
You don't need every answer to be permanent.
The goal isn't to construct a fixed identity and defend it forever.
It is simply to make what you already know about yourself a little easier to see.
References
Campbell, J. D. (1990). Self-esteem and clarity of the self-concept. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59(3), 538-549.
Campbell, J. D., Trapnell, P. D., Heine, S. J., Katz, I. M., Lavallee, L. F., & Lehman, D. R. (1996). Self-concept clarity: Measurement, personality correlates, and cultural boundaries. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70(1), 141-156.