Importance of self assessment.

In [social psychology], self-assessment is the process of looking at oneself in order to assess aspects that are important to one's identity. It is one of the motives that drive self-evaluation, along with self-verification and self-enhancement. Sedikides (1993) suggests that the self-assessment motive will prompt people to seek information to confirm their uncertain self-concept rather than their certain self-concept and at the same time people use self-assessment to enhance their certainty of their own self-knowledge. However, the self-assessment motive could be seen as quite different from the other two self-evaluation motives. Unlike the other two motives through self-assessment people are interested in the accuracy of their current self view, rather than improving their self-view. This makes self-assessment the only self-evaluative motive that may cause a person's self-esteem to be damaged.

Though self-assessment is one of the self-evaluation motives it could be suggested that it may not be the most popular one. Self-enhancement was displayed in each of the experiments conducted by Sedikide and self-assessment, and even self-verification to an extent was only displayed when it was teased out. This is not to say that self-assessment is not a self-evaluation motive, however most of the experiments conducted by Sedikides ended up with the participants reflecting on central traits rather than peripheral traits. This is unsurprising as they are the most important traits to a person's self-concept; however it is not therefore surprising that these are the traits that are enhanced rather than assessed as if someone assessed their central traits and found fault it would be more of an issue than finding a fault with a peripheral trait. The fifth experiment carried out by Sedikides^[1] shows that self-assessment does exist and is one of the self-evaluation motives; if people didn't self-assess then even in this experiment there would have been no difference between the reflections of those asked to be objective and those who were not. Self-assessment is a difficult motive to assess, as discovered by Sedikides but it is important to self-evaluation as it means that people are able to realize ways in which to improve themselves.