Social Desirability and the Manipulation of Self-Concepts

People crave success. Kunda and Sanitioso (1989) stated that our self-concept is malleable, that the desire to be more like others is enough for us to make subtle changes to our self-concept. 102 university students were each assigned to one of two groups. Each group was informed that either extraversion or introversion was responsible for academic success by way of fictitious study. They were then asked to rate the strength of characteristics in themselves. It was found that the extraversion success group rated themselves more highly on a majority of the tests given to them. As Kunda and Sanitioso (1989) found, the extraverted success groups differed in their self-ratings and a majority of the ratings. The extraversion success group rated the extraversion characteristics more highly than did the introverted success group. The extension of this study lead to a significant difference between the two groups rating themselves as more or less similar to another individual. This result suggested that people tend to prefer the company of people like themselves.…