Blending in at the Cost of Losing Oneself: Dishonest Self-Disclosure Erodes Self-Concept Clarity in Social Anxiety

Abstract

Self-concept clarity helps to promote self-esteem and guide adaptive social behavior. Recent studies have found that people with higher levels of trait social anxiety exhibit significantly diminished levels of self-concept clarity, but the mechanisms that might link higher social anxiety with lower self-concept clarity are untested and unknown. We propose that the relation between social anxiety and self-concept clarity is mediated by dishonest self-disclosure – a self-protective strategy in which one asserts an inauthentic or dishonest opinion to others based on what one believes others wish to hear rather than one's own genuine viewpoint. To test this prediction, we manipulated the honesty of participants' self-disclosures during a social task in the laboratory and measured subsequent changes in self-concept clarity. As hypothesized, dishonest relative to honest self-disclosure led to significantly reduced levels of self-concept clarity, but only amongst participants with higher levels of trait social anxiety. These findings help to elucidate the processes underlying the link between social anxiety and self-concept clarity and provide insight into the costs of adopting an inauthentic façade during interpersonal encounters when social conformity motives become salient.