Defining Self-Worth: Trait Self-Esteem Moderates the Use of Self-Serving Trait Definitions in Social Judgment

People possess self-serving definitions of social traits and categories. When a trait is positive, people emphasize their own attributes in their definition of the trait. When the trait is negative, they de-emphasize self-attributes. Across three studies, we discovered that this tendency is moderated by dispositional self-esteem. High self-esteem individuals articulate more self-serving trait definitions than their low esteem counterparts. This was revealed in explicit reports of trait definitions, reaction times used to report trait definitions, as well as in judgments of other people. Although more muted, the trait definitions of low self-esteem participants tended to be self-serving in one study and more even-handed in two others. Implications of these findings for understanding the relation of self to social judgment are discussed.