1-minute News | Can self-compassion promote self-improvement?

Everyone inevitably makes mistakes, but the attitude towards those mistakes varies greatly. Here's a research that examined the hypothesis that self-compassion motivates people to improve personal weaknesses, moral transgressions, and test performance.

Participants in a self-compassion condition, compared to a self-esteem control condition and either no intervention or a positive distraction control condition, expressed greater incremental beliefs about a personal weakness; reported greater motivation to make amends and avoid repeating a recent moral transgression; spent more time studying for a difficult test following an initial failure; exhibited a preference for upward social comparison after reflecting on a personal weakness; and reported greater motivation to improve the weakness.

These findings suggest that taking an accepting approach to personal failure may make people more motivated to improve themselves. So, sometimes don't be too harsh to yourself. Until next time, bye!