Motivations for self enhancement: 1. Self enhancement: motivation to view oneself positively, focusing more on one's strengths than weaknesses 2. Self esteem: positivity of your overall evaluation of yourself 3. Primarily studied with western populations 4. More common in subjective evaluations, not as biased in concrete measures, Ex: height, calculus ability 5. Self serving biases: tendencies for people to exaggerate how good they think they are, Ex: creativity, ability to get along with others 6. Evidence: a. Most north americans have high self esteem b. Most north americans view themselves in unrealistically positive terms c. Most north americans use self esteem maintenance strategies to discount negative feedback, Ex: self handicapping: partying before exam and blaming performance on it d. Study on college professors showed that 94% of them thought they were better than average professors (not possible) Downward social comparison: comparing performance to someone doing even worse Upward social comparison: comparing performance with someone doing better, often quite painful Compensatory self enhancement: acknowledge poor skill but think of another good skill to compensate, Ex: I suck at math but my english is good Discounting: reducing perceived importance of domain in which performed poorly External attribution: attribute cause of action to something outside themselves Internal attribution: locate the cause within ourselves such as our abilities Basking in the reflected glory: of a successful group we belong, allow share of other's success to compensate your failures Positive views have been increasing over time in USA through the use of more self admiration phrases (Ex: love yourself, just be yourself), more mentions of I love me Study on self enhancement: 1. Setup: asked participant to rate self on certain traits compared to average person of same age in terms of above or below average 2. Results: on traits with less concrete feedback (Ex: drive to achieve, self confidence, leadership ability) there is more self confidence and self esteem 3. Implications: westerners becoming more self enhancing Study on east asian and american self enhancement: 1. Setup: study on students at japanese and american university clubs asked to evaluate themselves and four clubmates, comparing how positively people evaluated themselves compared with how positively their four clubmates evaluated them. Self evaluations more positive than peer evaluations were evidence for self enhancement while self evaluations more negative than peer evaluations were evidence for self criticism. 2. Results: japanese students more likely to be self critical while american students more likely to be self enhancing 3. Implications: east asians self enhance less than north americans
Meta analysis on all published studies comparing westerners and east asians on measures of self enhancement: 1. Large cultural difference in self enhancement motivations 2. Westerners show evidence for self enhancement and east asians show evidence for self criticism 3. In study where mexicans americans and euro american kids had to point at pictures of kids for positive traits, they both mostly pointed at themselves, but euro americans pointed slightly more to themselves 4. Study shows that euro americans describe themselves with more