self-validating
Americanadjective
Etymology
Origin of self-validating
First recorded in 1940–45
Example Sentences
Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.
In 2012, Lauren Rivera, a professor at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, coined the term "looking glass merit" to describe the unconscious tendency that humans have to define merit in a way that is self-validating.
From Salon
He was seen, in the words of the art historian Charles Ford, as “classicism’s ‘other’: the self-made, self-validating, craft-based painter for profit.”
From Washington Post
But they didn’t exist within an insular, self-validating community whose values and assumptions were often at odds with those of the rest of society.
From Seattle Times
But even under today’s grotesquely swollen presidency, presidential impatience is not a self-validating source of extra-constitutional power.
From Washington Post
He worries the hostility toward Beijing that’s widespread among the American foreign policy establishment is “overblown” and could become a “self-validating narrative,” deepening a climate of tensions that some analysts already cast as the 21st century Cold War.
From Washington Post
Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023
Idioms from The American Heritage® Idioms Dictionary copyright © 2002, 2001, 1995 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.