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.
Functions
thumb|right|An early example of the process of self-assessment
If through self-assessing there is a possibility that a person's self-concept, or self-esteem is going to be damaged why would this be a motive of self-evaluation, surely it would be better to only self-verify and self-enhance and not to risk damaging self-esteem? Trope in a 1986 paper suggests that self-assessment is a way in which self-esteem can be enhanced in the future. For example, self-assessment may mean that in the short-term self-assessment may cause harm to a person's self-concept through realising that they may not have achieved as highly as they may like; however in the long term this may mean that they work harder in order to achieve greater things in the future, and as a result their self-esteem would be enhanced further than where it had been before self-assessment.
Within the self-evaluation motives however there are some interesting interactions. Self-assessment is found a lot of the time to be associated with self-enhancement as the two motives seem to contradict each other with opposing aims; whereas the motive to self-assess sees it as important to ensure that the self-concept is accurate the motive to self-enhance sees it as important to boost the self-concept in order to protect it from any negative feedback.
Research
In 1993, Constantine Sedikides performed an experiment investigating the roles of each of the self-evaluation motives, investigated if one was stronger and held more weight than others and tried to draw out specifically the self-assessment and self-verification motives. and would prefer to take part in higher accuracy tests. However, when only being asked if they would like to take part in high or low accuracy tasks does not give a complete accurate view of self-assessment; if there is no threat of actually taking part in the tasks the participants may not be as honest as if they actually had to take part. Brown The review also showed though that participants were more likely to succeed on tasks that they were told were high in accuracy. It is suggested that this is because when completing tasks that are highly accurate about a person's characteristics there is more to gain from succeeding in a task as it will therefore give more information about the person's characteristics than if it was low in accuracy.
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 Sedikides