Directed abstraction: Encouraging broad, personal generalizations following a success experience

People with negative self-views may fail to generalize appropriately from success experiences (e.g., Wood, Heimpel, Newby-Clark, & Ross, 2005). We drew on theories regarding self-views (Swann, Griffin, Predmore, & Gaines, 1987) and abstraction (Semin & Fiedler, 1991), as well as past linguistic framing work (e.g., Marigold, Holmes, & Ross, 2007, 2010; Salancik, 1974), to create a new technique to encourage people with negative self-views to generalize broadly from a success experience to the self-concept. We call this technique directed abstraction. In Experiment 1, participants with negative self-views who completed a directed abstraction writing task following success feedback regarding a novel laboratory task generalized more from that success, reporting higher ability levels and greater expectations of future success in the relevant domain. In Experiment 2, directed abstraction produced similar results (including more positive self-related affect, e.g., pride) after participants recalled a past public speaking success. In Experiment 3, participants high in fear of public speaking gave two speeches in a context designed to be challenging yet also to elicit successful performances. Directed abstraction helped these participants generalize from their success to beliefs about their abilities, expectations about the future, and confidence as a speaker. In Experiment 4, directed abstraction following success on a verbal task increased persistence in the face of failure on a subsequent verbal task. We discuss implications for understanding how and when people generalize from a success, compare directed abstraction to existing interventions, and suggest practical applications for this influence technique.