Self-enhancement
Self-enhancement is a type of motivation that works to make people feel good about themselves and to maintain self-esteem.
People who already have high esteem enhance their self-concept directly, by processing new information in a biased way.
People with low self-esteem use more indirect strategies, for example by avoiding situations in which their negative qualities will be noticeable.
[8] Self-protection appears to be the stronger of the two motives, given that avoiding negativity is of greater importance than encouraging positivity.
Its incidence is often highly systematic and can occur in any number of ways in order to achieve its goal of inflating perceptions of the self.
Awareness of self-enhancing processes would highlight the facade we are trying to create, revealing that the self we perceive is in fact an enhanced version of our actual self.
The self-serving attribution bias is very robust, occurring in public as well as in private,[25][26] even when a premium is placed on honesty.
[27] People most commonly manifest a self-serving bias when they explain the origin or events in which they personally had a hand or a stake.
[36] Similar findings emerge when the to-be-recalled information is personality traits,[42] relationship promoting or undermining behaviours,[43] frequencies of social acts,[44] and autobiographical memories.
[45] Selective acceptance involves taking as fact self-flattering or ego-enhancing information with little regard for its validity.
[48][49] People will strongly contest uncongenial information but readily accept at without question congenial information[50][51] The social nature of the world we live in means that self-evaluation cannot take place in an absolute nature – comparison to other social beings is inevitable.
However, the strength of the self-enhancement motive can cause the subjective exploitation of scenarios in order to give a more favourable outcome to the self in comparisons between the self and others.
People with higher self-esteem are more optimistic about both evading the failures and misfortunes of their inferiors and about securing the successes and good fortunes of their superiors.
Downwards social comparisons involve comparing oneself to an individual perceived to be inferior to or less skilled than the self.
[68] Consequently, when making social comparisons or estimations people can easily and subtly shift their construal of the meaning of those concepts in order to self-enhance.
[80] This permits self-enhancement to occur in two ways:[81] People low in self-esteem opt for discounting as a self-protective route to avoid being perceived as incompetent, whereas people high in self-esteem preferentially select augmenting as a method of self-promotion to enhance their perceived competence.
Whilst allowing the maintenance of positive self-views[91] self-handicapping has the cost of impairing objective performance.
[92] Students who report frequent use self-handicapping strategies underperform relative to their aptitude, with poor examination preparation mediating the effect.
It is a highly robust effect, as evidenced by the fact that even when the criteria on which the self and others are judged are identical the self is still perceived more favourably.
However, where an outcome is perceived as highly skilled, people often err on the side of caution and display a worse-than-average effect.
Some of the wide variety of documented examples of the above-average effect include observations that: People overestimate the level of control they have over outcomes and contingencies,[112] seeing their actions as influential even when they are in fact inconsequential.
People can both overestimate their ability to predict the future,[117] and underestimate how long it will take them to complete a variety of tasks.
Whilst promoting resilience amongst survivors of the September 11th terrorist attacks, those who self-enhanced were rated as having decreased social adaptation and honesty by friends and family.
[39] When plausibility reduces the impact of self-enhancement, undesirable evidence often has to be accepted, albeit reluctantly.
[75] The reason for this unwilling acceptance is to maintain effective social functioning, where unqualified self-aggrandizement would otherwise prevent it.
Many different materialisations of self-enhancement can occur depending on such social contexts: Psychological functioning is moderated by the influence of culture.
Self-enhancement appears to be a phenomenon largely limited to Western cultures, where social ties are looser than in the East.
[162] The self-improvement motive, as an aspiration towards a possible self[163] may also moderate a variety of psychological processes in both independent and interdependent cultures.
[21] Alternatively, self-enhancement may be represented only in terms of the characteristics that are deemed important by individuals as they strive to fulfil their culturally prescribed roles.
The issue over whether self-enhancement is universal or specific to Western cultures has been contested within modern literature by two researchers — Constantine Sedikides and Steven Heine.
