The power of one: benefits of individual self-expansion

Abstract The self-expansion model suggests that the acquisition of new identities, capabilities, perspectives, and resources primarily occurs in the context of romantic relationships and that self-expanding activities have numerous benefits for relationships. However, self-expansion can theoretically occur outside of a relational context, yet little is known about the benefits of self-expanding activities for individuals. Across six experimental studies, we examined: (1) whether nonrelational novel, exciting, and interesting activities produce self-expansion and (2) whether engaging in nonrelational self-expanding activities results in greater exerted effort. In Studies 1 and 2, individuals who engaged in novel, exciting, and interesting activities experienced greater self-expansion than those who engaged in control activities. In Studies 3–6, individuals who engaged in high self-expanding activities exerted more effort on cognitive and physical tasks than those who engaged in low self-expanding activities, and this effect was not due to depleted self-regulatory resources, altered mood, or changes in self-esteem (Studies 5 and 6). Keywords: self-expansionrelationshipseffortbehavior Notes 1. Because there were cases in which participants generated incorrect solutions to the solvable anagrams, we additionally explored whether self-expansion condition led participants to generate incorrect solutions for the solvable anagrams they were having difficulty solving (e.g. solving the “FRTID” anagram as trifd rather than the correct solution drift). This revealed a nonsignificant difference between the high (M = 0.14, SE = 0.10) and low (M = 0.20, SE = 0.10) expansion conditions on the number of solvable anagrams for which incorrect solutions were generated, F(1, 68) = 0.12, p = 0.740, d = 0.10, suggesting that participants in both the high and low self-expansion conditions generated incorrect solutions for the solvable anagrams at equal rates. Furthermore, the number of correct solutions for the solvable anagrams did not differ by self-expansion condition, F(1, 68) = 0.001, p = 0.971, d = 0.01. 2. Although the sample size for these analyses is somewhat small, a post hoc power analysis conducted with G∗Power 3 (Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, Citation2007) indicated that we had adequate power to detect the effect, power = 0.80, given our observed effect size of d = 1.00, α = 0.05, and a one-tailed test. 3. Including gender as an independent variable rather than a covariate revealed a nonsignificant Gender × Self-expansion interaction, p = 0.154, indicating that the high expansion task led to the same increase in effort over the low expansion task for both men and women. 4. As in Study 3, there was not a significant difference between the high (M = 0.18, SD = 0.46) and low expansion (M = 0.11, SD = 0.39) conditions on the number of solvable anagrams for which incorrect solutions were generated, t(80) = 0.76, p = 0.451, d = 0.16. 5. Including gender as an independent variable rather than a covariate revealed a nonsignificant Gender × Self-expansion interaction, p = 0.565, indicating that the high expansion task led to the same increase in effort over the low expansion task for both men and women.