COHEN, JOYCE.

The affects of level of abstraction on self-description inventories were investigated in this study. Seventy-five subjects were administered self-description inventories which assessed their overall standing on ten high level, abstract descriptors and ten low level, concrete descriptors. Subjects also indicated how much variability, certainty, and importance they associated with their responses. Results indicated that high level agents make judgments with more certainty than low level agents. Additionally, certainty and importance were unrelated thus indicating different aspects of self-understanding. Variability was negatively correlated with certainty yet positively correlated with the importance measure. This suggests that the notion of the self as a stable entity, as postulated by traditional self-concept theories, may be in error. It was advanced that variability be investigated as a flexible, adaptive aspect of self-understanding.