Friendly or just polite? The effect of self‐esteem on attributions

Studied the effect of a person's self‐esteem on his inferences about another person's feelings toward him. Fifty‐six mule and female college student subjects of high or low chronic self‐esteem (median split; modified version of Janis and Field's ‘Feelings of Inadequacy Scale’) received either a negative or a positive evaluation of themselves. They were told that the evaluation had been written by another subject who had acted either under ‘sincere’ instructions, which allowed him to give his own opinion, or under ‘role‐playing’ instructions, which assigned him to write either a positive or a negative evaluation. The subject's take was to decide under which instruction his evaluation had been written. It was predicted from a self‐concistency logic that low self‐esteem subjects would attribute negative evaluations to ‘sincere’ and positive evaluations to ‘role‐playing’ instructions, while high self‐esteem subjects would make the reverse attributions. A significant self‐esteem × evaluation positivity interaction (p <.01) supported this prediction.