One of the most startlingly effective things I’ve seen in the psychology literature is the power of “self-affirmation.”
The name is a bit misleading. The “self-affirmation” described in these studies isn’t looking in the mirror and telling yourself you’re beautiful. It’s actually values affirmation — writing short essays about what’s important to you in life (things like “family”, “religion”, “art”) and why you value them. The standard control intervention is writing about why a value that’s not very important to you might be important to someone else.
Values affirmation has been found in many studies to significantly improve academic performance in “negatively stereotyped” groups (blacks, Hispanics, and women in STEM), and these effects are long-lasting, continuing up to a year after the last exercise.[1] Values affirmation causes about a 40% reduction in the black-white GPA gap, concentrated in the middle- and low-performing students.[4]
This was startling and fascinating to me for a couple reasons. Firstly, if that’s true, that would be huge. We’ve thrown billions at the achievement gap mostly without results.
Secondly, I’d heard ‘self-affirmation’ thrown around before, and I assumed it was sort of like generic ‘positivity’ messages - you know, “love yourself!!’ and ‘you deserve the world!’ and I find all that stuff vaguely icky. (”love yourself” is super underspecified. What does that even mean? Is it an emotion? A belief? Do I have to be able to experience it persistently? On demand?)
But values affirmation - well, values affirmation makes a hell of a lot of sense to me. Sarah continues (bolding mine):
There is a kind of personal quality that has to do with believing you are fit to make value judgments. Believing that you are free to decide your own priorities in life; believing that you are generally competent to pursue your goals; believing that you are allowed to create a model of the world based on your own experiences and thoughts.
If you lack this quality, you will look to others to judge how worthy you are, and look to others to interpret the world for you, and you will generally be more anxious and more likely to unconsciously self-sabotage.
I think of this quality as being a free person or being sovereign. The psychological literature will often characterize it as “self-esteem”, but in popular language “self-esteem” is overloaded with “thinking you’re awesome”, which is different. Everybody has strengths and weaknesses and nobody is wonderful in every way. Being sovereign doesn’t require you to think you’re perfect; it is the specific feeling that you are allowed to use your own mind.
I’ve noticed people who have this thing. I’ve aspired to be a person who has this thing, and aspired to write in a way that carves out space for other people to find this thing. I didn’t have a word for it.
I think it’s the way that a lot of social justice goes wrong. I’ve seen a lot of activism that doesn’t feel like it’s coming from a place of “I want to empower others to decide their own priorities; I want the people around me to feel competent and supported in achieving their goals; I want to build a movement that lets us take our own experiences seriously in building a model of the world.” I’ve read stuff that feels like it’s saying ‘yeah we already got the answer to that step; now do what you’re told’.
And the research suggests that people can’t live like that, and shouldn’t.
