Interpreting the uninterpretable: The effect of self‐esteem on the interpretation of meaningless feedback

People often seek out and retain positive information about themselves via self‐enhancement processes. Under other circumstances, they seek out and retain self‐confirmatory information via self‐verification processes. Research on both of these self‐evaluation processes has been based heavily on domains such as social skills, in which people have a large database of prior information that presumably influences the way in which incoming self‐relevant information is interpreted. In the present research, participants were asked to evaluate themselves on a set of imaginary “pseudotraits” to investigate how self‐esteem influences the self‐evaluation process when prior information is unavailable. Participants who had been identified through pre‐testing as either high or low in self‐esteem received false feedback on five pseudotraits (e.g., “casortic”), after which they evaluated the favorability of this feedback. High self‐esteem participants tended to view their feedback as favorable, whereas low self‐esteem participants did not.