Maintaining Stable and Certain Self-Views: Self-Beliefs with More Semantic Implications are More Stable and Confident

People vary in the extent to which their self-concepts are clearly and confidently defined, and stable across time. It remains unclear how the structural relationships among self-beliefs affect the certainty and stability of the self-concept. We investigated the extent to which people feel certain in their self-evaluations (Study 1) and self-evaluate consistently across 1-2 weeks (Study 2) as a function of semantic relationships. People were most certain in self-evaluations on traits with more implications for other aspects of the self-concept, and these evaluations changed the least across timepoints. Further, people were most certain in self-evaluations that were extreme and similar to self-evaluations on semantically related traits. Finally, individuals with greater psychological adjustment and cognitive reflection evaluated traits with more implications with greater confidence and stability across time. Findings suggest that people may attend to structural relations among self-beliefs in a manner that preserves a coherent self-concept.