When Success Feels Authentic: A Feasibility-Based Account

Building on evidence that authenticity reflects both self-congruence and self-enhancement, this account predicts that these influences are interdependent, such that positive outcomes feel most authentic when they are experienced as realistically achievable given one’s domain-specific beliefs. Across three within-person experiments ( N s = 97, 143, 146), participants imagined successful or unsuccessful behavior in domains varying in self-relevance and evaluated its authenticity. In all studies, imagining successful behavior increased perceived authenticity, but the magnitude of this effect reflected alignment with domain-specific self-beliefs; success felt more authentic in domains where participant perceived higher standing. This pattern generalized across multiple operationalizations of self-beliefs (self-potential, anticipated others’ evaluations, and personality traits) and was not explained by social desirability. Alignment effects were associated with perceived behavioral difficulty, consistent with a feasibility-based account. Together, the findings suggest that authenticity judgments reflect whether anticipated behavior plausibly originates from oneself.