Too Much of a Good Thing?*

discrepancy theories generally, assumes that people are motivated to verify their identities by seeking feedback from others which is not discrepant from their own self-views (Burke 1991; Burke and Stets 1999; Higgins 1987; Higgins, Klein, and Strauman 1985; Stets and Burke 1996; Swann 1983). When the dimension of meaning that is relevant to the identity is one of evaluation, people want others to evaluate them at the same level as they evaluate themselves. Evaluations by others that are more negative than self-evaluations disconfirm their identity and lead to negative self-feelings, as do evaluations that are more positive than self-evaluations(Swann, Pelham, and Krull 1989). In contrast, self-enhancement (SE) theories suggest that people are motivated primarily to seek positive evaluations from others and to avoid negative evaluations. Jones (1973), for example, argued that people behave in a manner that leads to the maintenance or enhancement of their self-evaluation or self-esteem, and that individuals with low self-esteem ought to respond more favorably to positive evaluations from others than those with high self-esteem. Others have shown that people employ a number of strategies for enhancing their evaluations of themselves (Baumeister 1982; Brown, Collins, and Schmidt 1988; Kaplan 1975, 1980) These theoretical perspectives focus on persons’ motivation to seek to reduce discrepancy or to increase enhancement through their feedback from others; the two approaches also differ as to the consequences of the feedback for self-feelings. Although both ICT and SE theories suggest that people feel bad as a result of evaluations by others that are below the level of self-evaluation, they disagree on what happens when these evaluations are higher than self-evaluations. SE theories suggest that a person’s selfesteem is enhanced; discrepancy theories such as ICT suggest that people feel bad as a consequence of being overevaluated. These two motivations have been studied and discussed in the literature, and each has received some support. Yet we still lack a full Social Psychology Quarterly 2005, Vol. 68, No. 4, 359–374