Rebecca J. Schlegel, Joshua A. Hicks, Jamie Arndt and Laura A. King (2009), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96(2):473–490 — DOI-10.1037/a0014060
The brief’s citation is correct. Crossref gives only the year; No. 2 of
the 2009 volume is the February issue, so published: carries 1 February
2009.
Key takeaways
- The true self-concept is a source of felt meaning, as a cognitive structure. People who classify their own “true self” traits faster report more meaning in life; people who classify their “actual” (everyday, public) self traits faster do not (Studies 1, 2, 4).
- Making it accessible raises meaning. Subliminally flashing a person’s own true-self traits before a meaning questionnaire raised reported meaning against actual-self primes (Study 3) and against disliked actual-self primes (Study 5), controlling baseline meaning.
- Not because it is flattering. Disliked true-self traits worked as well as liked ones (Study 5), and true-self priming did not raise state self-esteem. Liking matters for the actual self, not the true one.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-03 at the owner’s request, as the batch’s experimental
work on the true self. It is psychology with no instruction for
machine-learning practice, so no anthology topic holds it. Primary tag
self, since its subject is a self-concept; self-governance because its
question is the psychological weight of what a person takes to be his own;
cognition for the accessibility and priming methods.
Measured against two constructs the record holds.
- Kernis and Goldman’s authenticity (LIT-574), declared
compared_against. Studies 4 and 5 measure authenticity with their 45-item AI-3 and test whether true-self accessibility predicts meaning beyond it. In Study 4 authenticity predicted meaning (β = .34) and so did true-self accessibility (β = .19) with each other controlled, and the two were uncorrelated (r = .05). The Limitations section frames this as a test of whether the two “tap the same underlying construct” (p. 487), and concludes they do not. So the self-reported authenticity the field measures is not the same thing as how readily one’s own true-self traits come to mind. - Ryan and Deci’s basic need satisfaction (LIT-559), declared
compared_against. Every correlational study enters need satisfaction (Gagné’s Basic Psychological Needs Scale, cited to Ryan & Deci 2000) as a rival source of meaning. It predicted meaning in Studies 1 and 2 (β = .37, .32) and true-self accessibility kept its own effect; the paper names basic need satisfaction alongside authenticity as a construct its own differs from (p. 487).
Where it bears.
- Authenticity and autonomy. For THEORY-054, which places autonomy in integration measured by self-report, the paper is a methodological model: an implicit measure (reaction time) and an experimental manipulation of a self-related construct, the kind of evidence the SDT accounts lack. It does not measure integration.
- Meaning. The meaning measured is purely subjective (the MLQ Presence subscale and four PIL items). Wolf’s hybrid view, as Hiekel discusses it (LIT-183), makes meaning require objective attractiveness as well; nothing here bears on that half.
- Taylor (LIT-594). The paper itself places its subject historically: the search for a true self is “firmly entrenched in modern times” and may answer the erosion of shared sources of value (pp. 474, 487). That is Taylor’s diagnosis, reached by citing Baumeister, Bellah and Frankl, not Taylor.
Read in NOTE-469.