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Major advances in science often occur when the work of a large number of researchers begins to converge on a single unifying construct. Within psychology, for example,“learning” dominated the psychological landscape of the 1950s,“attitude” served as a rallying point in the 1960s,“attribution” was pervasive during the 1970s, and “cognition” was ubiquitous during the 1980s and 1990s. Even when the specific topics studied under a particular conceptual umbrella vary widely, the overlapping and complementary findings of many researchers often lead to a rapid, synergistic accumulation of knowledge. In retrospect, periods in which a large number of researchers rally around the same maypole may appear somewhat faddish. Nonetheless, progress on a particular topic is often rapid when researchers invest a good deal of time and effort in it. Since the 1970s, one such unifying construct within psychology and other social and behavioral sciences has been the self, as hundreds of thousands of articles, chapters, and books have been devoted to self-related phenomena. The various topics that have fallen under the umbrella of the self have been quite diffuse—self-awareness, self-esteem, self-control, identity, self-verification, selfaffirmation, self-conscious emotions, selfdiscrepancy, self-evaluation, self-monitoring, and so on—leading Baumeister (1998) to conclude that “self is not really a single topic at all, but rather an aggregate of loosely related subtopics”(p. 681). In one sense, this is undoubtedly true. Yet virtually all of these phenomena involve, in one way or another, the capacity for self-reflection that lies at the heart of what it means to have a self …