Identity maintenance and cognitive test performance

Identity maintenance processes can affect performance when that performance is relevant to an important self-identity, including performance on standardized tests of mental ability. Affect control theory proposes that individuals’ performances are motivated to maintain concordance between fundamental sentiments about identities and contextually driven transient meanings. An experimental test used the college major identity and randomly assigned participants to different instruction sets that made an aptitude test either relevant to their major or a contrasting major (All participants took the Raven advanced progressive matrices test.). Participants who took a test of mental ability that they expected would verify their identity scored two and a half points higher than did participants who took a test of mental ability expected to verify a contrasting identity. Results strongly support the fundamental validity of affect control theory’s predictions about situational meaning maintenance [Heise, David R., 1979. Understanding Events: Affect and the Construction of Social Action. Cambridge University Press, New York; Heise, David R., 1985. Affect control theory: respecification, estimation and tests of the formal model. Journal of Mathematical Sociology 11, 191–222; Heise, David R., 2007. Expressive Order: Confirming Sentiments in Social Actions. Springer Science + Business Media, LLC, New York; Heise, David R., MacKinnon, Neil J., 1988. Affective bases of likelihood judgments. In: Smith-Lovin, Lynn, Heise, David R. (Eds.), Analyzing Social Interaction: Advances in Affect Control Theory. Gordon and Breach, New York, pp. 133–152].