Cognitive, Affective, and Attributional Effects of Potential Threats to Self-Esteem

An experiment was conducted to determine whether events that threaten self-esteem affect cognition, anxiety, and attributions independently of their concomitant threat to social esteem. Subjects completed an ego-threatening test, believing that only they, only another individual, both they and the other individual, or no one would see their test scores. On cognitive and affective measures, subjects who were told they would see their own scores expressed greater apprehension than those who did not expect to see their scores, regardless of whether or not the other individual would see them, thereby demonstrating that threats to self-esteem may occur independently of threats to social esteem. However, attributions were affected only by whether or not the other individual would see the scores, indicating that subjects' attributions served to minimize the threat to social esteem.