ABSTRACT
When faced with the question “Who am I?,” a person must call on information contained within his or her self-concept, the cognitive schema that includes one’s self-knowledge, and self-beliefs (Baumeister, 1998) used to organize and process information relevant to the self (Kihlstrom & Cantor, 1984; Markus, 1977, 1980). Importantly, the self-concept allows individuals to actively integrate new information and experiences into existing images and knowledge of the self. Through this process, people can use their current selfconcepts to approach and interpret new self-relevant information, and in turn determine the most appropriate means of folding that feedback into the self-concept and organizing the new and old together. Self-concept clarity, the extent to which one’s self-concept is “clearly and confidently defined, internally consistent, and temporally stable,” is one variable that can contribute to how people go about this process of integrating self-relevant information into their existing self-concepts (Campbell et al., 1996, p. 141).
