Rosenberg’s Selectivity Hypothesis

Abstract

Chapter 7 introduces Rosenberg’s selectivity hypothesis, which proposes that people select as psychologically important self-conceptions those characteristics on which they excel and discount those on which they do not. The chapter shows how an inherent contradiction between the mechanisms of selectivity and interaction explains the failure of Marsh and other researchers to confirm Rosenberg’s interactive hypothesis. This leads into a discussion of studies that support the interactive hypothesis by incorporating the selectivity bias into their measure of psychological centrality, followed by a replication of the important study of Pelham and Swann (1989). The chapter concludes by reporting an additional analysis predicting self-sentiments from identity sentiments weighted by the extent to which they are used as self-conceptions.