What if I told you that a five-minute activity can not only help people make positive changes, but also maintain those changes more than two years later?
A group of researchers conducted two studies with female university students who were dissatisfied with their weight.1,2 The participants completed questionnaires about their eating, exercise, ideal weight, confidence in their ability to lose weight, and concerns about their body; their height and weight were measured, and their body mass index (BMI) was calculated. They were also randomly assigned to complete one of two brief, self-directed activities, both unrelated to body weight, appearance, or weight loss: a “self-affirmation” activity or a neutral (“control”) activity. They were given no guidance or counseling on diet, exercise, or weight loss methods.
About two months later, the participants returned to repeat the assessments. In both studies, women who had self-affirmed—and particularly, those whose BMI was high initially—weighed less than they did at their first visit, while the control group (who had not self-affirmed) weighed more. In the second study, women with high BMIs who had self-affirmed also reported more exercise, and they were observed eating more healthful foods than those who had not self-affirmed.
After another two years, the researchers reached out to the women in both studies and assessed them again.3 They found that high-BMI women who had self-affirmed at their first visit had kept their weight the same, whereas those who had not self-affirmed were continuing to gain more weight.
It may be hard to appreciate just how remarkable these results are. One of the most reliable findings in research on psychosocial interventions (counseling, therapy, advice, instruction, etc.) is that even when they’re effective in the short term, the results usually fade over time. What kind of brief activity, which had nothing directly to do with weight loss, could continue to have a positive effect more than two years later?
What Is Self-Affirmation?
In motivational interviewing, affirming refers to the expression of appreciation or admiration for a person’s actions, intentions, strengths, or enduring characteristics.4 But in these studies, participants were not invited to affirm themselves in this way.
Rather, they were given a list of values—none of which were related to weight, health, or appearance—and asked to rank them in order of personal importance, and then write about a time when their most important value had been important to them and why it was important to them.5 That’s it: the intervention had nothing to do with weight loss, their efforts to lose weight, or how they felt about the whole subject; it simply asked them to think about what mattered most to them and describe how they had lived out that value at another time in their life.
These studies are part of a robust research literature that consistently demonstrates the positive effects of a variety of self-affirmation activities of this kind.6 In the area of health behavior change, for example, low-income, heavy cigarette smokers in the UK were more receptive to a novel anti-smoking message and expressed greater intention to change when they self-affirmed prior to receiving the message7; university students in China were more receptive to information on COVID-19 vaccines, and had higher vaccination intention, if they self-affirmed prior to receiving the information.8
The self-affirmation effect has also been found in the area of academic performance. Black middle school students who were randomly assigned to self-affirm had higher grade point averages (GPA) over 2 years than those who did not self-affirm; the largest effect was among low-achieving Black students, whereas GPA was unaffected in White students who self-affirmed.9 College women enrolled in Introductory Physics who were randomly assigned to self-affirm earned higher grades than did those who did not self-affirm; the largest effect was in women who wondered if the old stereotype that women are inferior to men in the study of science might be true.10
How Does Self-Affirmation Work?
These last two studies hint at the source of self-affirmation’s power. The psychologist Claude Steele proposed that stereotype threat—the fear, felt by members of groups stigmatized as inferior in a particular area, that they may confirm the negative stereotype by performing poorly—can create a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, interfering with their performance and resulting in the very outcome they dread.11 If this is so, an activity that reduces the threat could result in people performing up to their actual potential.
However, positive effects from self-affirmation activities have been found not only in members of stigmatized groups, but in a wide variety of populations and behaviors. So if self-affirmation works in all these cases by reducing a perceived threat, what sort of threat is it reducing? And why would writing about an important value and its role in your life reduce it?
I’ll take up these two important questions in part 2 of this series.
