self-enhancement

n. Self-enhancement relates to a motive to protect, maintain, and promote a class of emotional states called feelings of self-worth. These emotional states include positive and negative emotions (e.g., pride and shame). The self-enhancement motive calls attention to the fact that people prefer to feel proud of themselves rather than ashamed of themselves.

Self-enhancement biases. n. Psychological motives do not reveal themselves directly. Instead, we infer their existence by analyzing how people behave in specifiable situations. If we find that behavior is consistently biased in a particular direction, we assume an underlying motive is at work. With respect to the self-enhancement motive, three behaviors are relevant: (a) The way people evaluate themselves, (b) the manner in which they approach and process self-relevant information; and (c) the way they respond when circumstances threaten their feelings of selfworth. In the following sections, I show how these behaviors support the existence of the self-enhancement.

Self-enhancing self-evaluations. Self-evaluations provide the most obvious example of a selfenhancement bias. Suppose you randomly select a group of people and ask each person how honest he/she is compared to most other people. Logically, approximately half of the respondents should say they are more honest than others and half should say they are less honest than others. This does not occur. Instead, the vast majority of your sample will say they are more honest than most other people (a tendency known as the “better than most” effect). Insofar as most people cannot be more honest than most other people, assessments of this sort are said to be illusory.

The better than most effect occurs for a wide range of attributes. For example, people think they are more caring than others, more deserving than others, more insightful than others, and fairer than others. They also believe they drive better than others, are happier than others, and have more satisfying interpersonal relationships than do others.

The bias also includes people we care about or associate with. When making social evaluations, people appraise their friends, family, and fellow group members more positively than they appraise most other people. In fact, the bias even extends to inanimate objects. People evaluate their initials, birth dates, and possessions in overly positive terms. In short, things that are mine or ours are evaluated more positively than things that are yours or theirs.

Considering how common the better than most effect is, you might think that people are aware they are biased. Think again! Instead, most people believe they are less biased than are other people. For example, when discussing politics, we believe our opinions are well supported by facts, but other people's opinions are driven by ideology. We also believe our judgments are less distorted by greed, self-aggrandizement, or personal gain than are other people's judgments, and that we are open-minded and impartial but other people are narrow-minded and prejudiced.

Numerous processes produce the better than most effect. Perhaps the most important one is that traits are inherently ambiguous. Consider, for example, what it means to be honest. Does it mean you always tell your friends what you really think about their new hairstyle and clothes, that you never lie on your income tax, or always correct a waiter when he forgets to charge you for some item? Each of these examples is indicative of honesty, but none is essential. This opens the door for individuals to define honesty in ways that cast them in a favorable light. Most people take advantage of this opportunity. They define traits in ways that allow them to believe they possess many positive and few negative traits. For example, a person who is lithe and quick defines athletic ability in terms of speed and balance; a person who is beefy and muscular defines athletic ability in terms of power and strength. In this manner, each believes she is more athletic than the other.

Self-enhancement biases in the processing of personal information. People also process feedback in a self-enhancing way. First, they avidly approach positive feedback but reluctantly seek negative feedback. This pattern ensures that most of the feedback they receive will be positive. Most people also uncritically accept positive feedback but carefully scrutinize and refute negative feedback, show better memory for positive feedback than negative feedback, interpret ambiguous feedback as more positive than negative, and introspect about themselves in ways that enable them to believe they possess many positive qualities and few negative ones.

People also accept responsibility for their successes but deflect responsibility for their failures, a phenomenon known as the selfserving bias in causal attributions. To illustrate, when students do well on a test, they readily credit their ability. When they do poorly on a test, they blame the professor for asking tricky questions or excuse their performance by citing an illness, bad mood, or poor study skills. This pattern enables them to maintain overly positive beliefs in their ability even in the face of failure.

In some cases, individuals will even sabotage their own performance by actively creating an impediment to success. For example, a student may fail to study for an exam or an athlete may fail to practice before an upcoming competition. Although these so-called self-handicapping strategies make success less likely, they give people a ready-made excuse for failure. To illustrate, if a student who fails to study for an exam does poorly, he/she blames the poor performance on a lack of preparation, thereby evading the conclusion that he/she lacks ability. And if he/she happens to succeed, lack of effort provides even stronger evidence of high ability. After all, only a veritable genius could succeed when saddled with the impediment of insufficient preparation.

Self-enhancement biases following threats to selfworth. People cannot always avoid receiving negative feedback about themselves. For some of us, years of struggling with the most basic of household repairs provide irrefutable evidence that we lack mechanical ability. When this occurs, individuals create acknowledged pockets of incompetence by readily admitting to possessing the limitation in question, to the point that they may even exaggerate the extent of their deficiency. At the same time, they call on a host of reserve self-enhancement strategies to minimize the damage this admission does to their overall feelings of self-worth.

First, they minimize the attribute's importance. A person who is all thumbs in the woodshop but has a green thumb in the garden tends to regard mechanical ability as less important than gardening skills. The reverse is true for someone who is more accomplished at building boats than growing plants. By derogating the importance of qualities they lack, individuals are able to accept a limitation and still ensure that its negative impact on their self-worth is minimal. In a similar vein, individuals tend to exaggerate the commonality of their deficiencies. Although they believe their skills are rare and distinctive (e.g., few people can solve crossword puzzles as quickly as I can), they believe their deficiencies are ordinary and common (e.g., most people do not know a sparkplug from a piston). Viewing one's shortcomings as common softens the negative impact of an accepted deficiency.

Downward social comparison provides another means of neutralizing negative feedback. This strategy involves comparing oneself with others who are worse off than one. For example, a student who receives a D in a course can console himself/herself by comparing with those who failed the class. By focusing on those who are even more disadvantaged, one's own situation looks good in comparison. Alternatively, one can augment self-worth by emphasizing one's association with those who are relatively advantaged on some dimension. This strategy is known as “basking in reflected glory.” To illustrate, one study found that students are more likely to use the pronoun we when discussing a football game their university team had won than when talking about a game their team had lost (e.g., we won; they lost). Moreover, this tendency was most apparent after the students had first experienced a personal failure. Emphasizing one's association with successful others allows individuals to succeed vicariously, even in situations in which they have personally failed.

A final strategy that may be used to offset negative feedback regarding one aspect of the self is to exaggerate one's worth in other aspects of the self. To illustrate, an individual who has recently been rebuffed by a lover may offset this blow to self-worth by exaggerating his/her athletic prowess. This process, known as self-affirmation, has been shown to provide a powerful antidote to a wide range of negative experiences that threaten feelings of selfworth. In fact, simply reminding oneself that one holds many fine values or has many fine qualities is sometimes sufficient to neutralize the impact of negative feedback.

When looking over all of these various strategies, it is important to note that they can all be used somewhat interchangeably. If one strategy does not work to restore feelings of self-worth, individuals will simply turn to another. The specific means by which selfenhancement occurs is thus far less important than the commitment to restore it. This is why psychologists believe an underlying motive drives all of these behaviors. If one strategy is thwarted or ineffective, individuals simply turn to another to help them feel better about themselves.

Assessing the accuracy of people's self-views. Self-enhancement biases are also revealed when we assess the accuracy of people's selfviews. Considering all of the feedback people receive in life, you might think we all have a pretty good idea of what we are like. There is some evidence for accuracy in domains of low importance (e.g., people are reasonably accurate about how tidy they are), but there is not much evidence for accuracy in domains of high importance. For example, people's judgments of their intelligence, attractiveness, and likability are only weakly correlated with the judgments of neutral, unbiased observers. A low correlation does not mean no one is accurate, only that, on average, people are just as likely to be accurate as inaccurate.

People are also biased when they predict their future. For the most part, they are overly optimistic. They believe their future will be much brighter than base rate data can justify. For example, although the current divorce rate is a bit over 50%, only 25% of newlyweds believe there is any chance they will not stay married for life. These estimates arise, in part, because couples view their relationship in unrealistically positive terms. They believe their love is stronger than other people's love, and that the problems that beset other people's relationships, such as poor communication skills or incompatible interests, pose less of a threat to their own relationship.

These biases extend to other areas of life as well. Across a wide range of good and bad outcomes, people believe their lives will be better than other people's lives. For example, people believe they are more likely than their peers to have a gifted child, own their own home, or live to a ripe old age. Conversely, they believe they are less likely than their peers to experience negative events, such as having a serious automobile accident, being a crime victim, or becoming depressed. Insofar as everyone's future cannot logically be rosier than everyone else's, the extreme optimism individuals display is illusory.

Cross-cultural issues. Many, though not all, psychologists believe that self-enhancement needs are universal. Across cultures, people the world over are motivated to feel good about themselves rather than bad about themselves. At the same time, cultures clearly influence how the motive is satisfied and expressed, and many of the biases we have been discussing are more prevalent in America, Canada, and the countries of Western Europe than they are in some East Asian countries, such as China and Japan. The most likely explanation for these cultural differences is that Western cultures encourage people to think of themselves in highly positive terms, whereas East Asian cultures emphasize humility and interconnectedness with others rather than bluster and bravado.

Self-esteem and self-enhancement biases. Across cultures, many of the self-enhancement biases I have reviewed are greatly reduced or entirely absent among low-self-esteem people or those who are depressed. This association has led some theorists to speculate that selfenhancement biases promote psychological well-being. Others have argued that people are better served by knowing what they are really like, and that self-enhancement is a disguised form of narcissism.

Although there is evidence on both sides of the matter, most of the evidence shows that positive self-evaluations are generally beneficial, provided that the degree of distortion is mild. People who think they are better than they really are, exaggerate their ability to bring about desired outcomes, and are unrealistically optimistic about their future are happier, have more satisfying friendships and romantic relationships, are more productive and creative in their work, and are better able to cope and grow with life's challenges than are people with more realistic self-views. In short, rather than knowing the truth about themselves, individuals seem to be better off thinking they are slightly better than they really are. – JDB