L - 19 The Self III Flashcards
What is the ‘better than average effect”?
According to Myers (1998) the better than average effect says that for nearly any subjective and socially desirable dimension, the majority of people see themselves as better than average.
What is a temporal self comparison?
Temporal self comparisons are made by comparing your current self to past selves, these comparisons are generally downward social comparisons; i.e. make us feel better.
What did Wilson and Ross (2001) find regarding temporal social comparisons?
They found that people rated their present selves significantly more favourably than their past selves.
However, when rating an acquaintance, there was no significant difference in present or past ratings.
What can biased attributions lead us to do in terms of self-enhancement?
We tend to attribute our failures to external factors (the exam was unfair), while attribute our successes to internal factors (I’m a fkn genius).
These biased attributions allow us to take credit for success and discount our failures in order to maintain self-image.
What is an example of how people tend to define categories and/or traits in self-serving ways?
We tend to define categories and traits in ways which are congruent with ourselves.
e.g: “What makes a good son/daughter?”
We are likely to answer in a way which defines our own attributes: dependable, obedient vs. thoughtful, loving.
Define self handicapping:
Creating obstacles to success in order to protect the self.
e. g. If you think you are not going to go well on an exam, you can do things like:
- not study.
- the night before the exam you go out and take ket.
These can then act as external factors allowing you to discount your failure, and increase the glory of success.
Outline Berglas and Jones’ (1967) experiment where they used analogy tasks:
Berglas and Jones employed an analogies task when half participants were given solvable analogies and the other half were given impossible analogies.
All participants were told that they had done well.
Participants in the solvable conditions made internal attributions (I’m smart).
Participants in the unsolvable condition made external attributions (I got lucky).
Berglas and Jones’ (1967) then gave participants an opportunity to chose one of two ‘experimental drugs’, one of which would improve performance, and the other which would inhibit performance, who chose what?
Participants in the solvable analogies condition chose the performance enhancing drug.
Participants in the unsolvable analogies condition chose the inhibiting drug, showing a self-handicapping effect.
According to the self-evaluation maintenance model (Tesser & Campbell, 1982), how can we respond when we are out-performed by somebody?
- BIRGing: basking in reflected glory
- “My son is the best soccer player in the world.”
- “I went to school with Hugh Jackman.” - Engaging in social comparison.
What factors determine which way we will respond to being out-performed?
Closeness:
- you can’t BIRG with a stranger.
- more likely to compare ourselves to people that we’re close to.
Self-relevance: how much you care about the domain.
If the person is close, and the domain is relevant -> social comparison.
If the person is close, and domain is not relevant -> BIRGing.
How do we maintain positive self-evaluation after being out-performed in a domain?
- Reduce the closeness of the person.
- Reduce the relevance of the domain (“sour-grapes
effect”). - Reduce the performance gap (work harder).
- Sabotaging the other person.
Describe Tesser and Smith’s (1980) study on sabotaging between two pairs of male friends on a “password game”?
The study manipulated difficulty of clues given to help guess the password (easy vs. hard), as well as the relevance (measure of verbal skills vs. unrelated).
Each person took turn in guessing password and remaining 3 choose clues.
One member of each pair was given bogus poor feedback. They were then given then given the chance to select clues for the other pair member.
What did Tesser and Smith’s (1980) study on sabotaging between two pairs of male friends on a “password game” find?
The clues provided depended on relevance.
When the task was framed as a measure of verbal ability (high relevance), they gave their friends harder clues than strangers.
When task was framed as not relevant, they helped friends more than strangers (easier clues).
