Acquiring self-knowledge: The search for feedback that fits

This report is concerned with the influence of people's self-conceptions on the feedback they solicit during their social interactions. In the first of three empirical investigations, participants were given an opportunity to seek feedback from interaction partners that would either confirm or disconfirm their self-concep-tions. In this investigation, participants displayed a clear preference for feedback that would confirm their self-perceived emotionality and self-perceived asser-tiveness. Participants in Investigation 2 spent more money for the purchase of self-confirmatory social feedback than self-disconfirmatory feedback. The third investigation asked what might motivate this tendency to preferentially solicit self-confirmatory feedback. It was found that participants regard self-confir-matory feedback as especially informative. This suggests that the feedback pref-erences found in Investigations 1 and 2 may reflect a cognitively based tendency for people to regard confirmatory instances of phenomena to be more diagnostic and compelling than disconfirmatory instances of phenomena. The discussion considers how people's efforts to solicit self-confirmatory feedback from other