Predicting Self‐Confident Behaviour with Implicit and Explicit Self‐Esteem Measures

The present research compared the validity of popular direct and indirect measures of self-esteem in predicting self-confident behaviour in different social situations. In line with behavioural dual-process models, both implicit and explicit self-esteem were hypothesized to be related to appearing self-confident to unacquainted others. A total of 127 participants responded to the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, the Multidimensional Self-Esteem Scale, and an adjective scale for measuring explicit self-esteem (ESE). Participants' implicit self-esteem (ISE) was assessed with four indirect measures: the Implicit Association Test (IAT), the name-letter task (NLT), and two variants of an affective priming task, the reaction-time affective priming task (RT-APT) and the error-based affective priming task (EB-APT). Self-confident behaviour was observed in four different social situations: (i) self-introduction to a group; (ii) an ostracism experience; (iii) an interview about the ostracism experience; and (iv) an interview about one's personal life. In general, appearing self-confident to unknown others was independently predicted by ESE and ISE. The indirect measures of self-esteem were, as expected, not correlated, and only the self-esteem APTs—but not the self-esteem IAT or the NLT—predicted self-confident behaviours. It is important to note that in particular the predictive power of the self-esteem EB-APT pertained to all four criteria and was incremental to the ESE measures. Copyright © 2016 European Association of Personality Psychology