Attributional communication, situational involvement, self-esteem and interpersonal attraction

Two experiments were conducted which assumed that persons with extremely high or low self-esteem would be more defensive than moderate self-esteem persons when receiving ego-threatening communication. In Study I, students imagined themselves in situations in which a professor told them they had succeeded or failed on a test. For some students, success was attributed to excessive test ease, while, for others, success was attributed to high ability. For still other students, failure was either attributed to lack of ability or to excessive test difficulty. Within the Success-Environment and Failure-Environment conditions, significant curvilinear self-esteem-attraction relations were found. Study II replicated Study I. It was also found that the use of second person versus third person wordings of the simulated communication situations produced differential self-esteem-attraction relationships. Generally, the results were consistent with the ego-defense hypothesis.