Dare to be yourself: courage promotes self-authenticity via sense of power

ABSTRACT

The benefits of self-authenticity have been well-documented, although courage is needed to be true to oneself. The present work aims to test whether courage is associated with and promotes self-authenticity. This hypothesis was confirmed across six studies (N = 3868). Study 1 showed that courage was positively related to self-authenticity. Having participants recall courageous (vs. cowardly or neutral) acts, Study 2 showed that temporarily heightened courage could enhance self-authenticity. Studies 3–5 further showed that sense of power could mediate the effect of courage on self-authenticity both at the trait and the state levels. Study 6 demonstrated the causal effect of sense of power on state self-authenticity by manipulating the sense of power. Overall, the current findings provide empirical evidence for the classic wisdom that courage enables one to be authentic and reveal the mediating role of sense of power in this process. Implications and limitations are also discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Courage
• self-authenticity
• true self
• sense of power

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author contributions

All authors contributed to the manuscript drafting. Ying Yang and Xijing Wang conceptualized and designed the study. Material preparation, data collection and analysis were performed by Shuhua Zhu, Ying Yang and Lishen Wang. All the authors drafted, revised and approved the manuscript.

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/j9mux/

Ethics approval

This study was approved by Zhejiang Ocean University’s Behavioral Research Ethics Board (ZJOUIRB20211214001).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/17439760.2024.2338806

Notes

1. Additionally, we tested the mediating role of sense of power in the associations between courage and the three self-authenticity components. The results showed that sense of power also significantly mediated the associations between courage and the three self-authenticity components (for detailed statistics, see Table 1S in supplementary materials).

2. We also tested the mediating role of sense of power in the relationship between courage and the three self-authenticity components. The results showed that sense of power significantly mediated the causal link between courage and authentic living, while the mediating effects of sense of power in the causal links between courage and accepting external influence and self-alienation were not significant (for detailed statistics, see Table 2S in supplementary materials).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Department of Education of Zhejiang Province [Y202147661].