Self-enhancement:

Conceptualization and Measurement

Self-enhancement is a signature effect in social cognition. I offer a brief historical review of theory and research on self-enhancement, followed by a short introduction and critique of conventional discrepancy-score measures of the effect. Then, I introduce a decision-theoretic approach, which mitigates some of the problems of conventional measures and crucially permits a distinction between self-enhancement bias and error. I then present the results of a person-perception study to show that naïve observers (more so than scientists) distinguish between bias and error. Finally, I present evidence for the claim that self-enhancement error is a causal antecedent of motivated projection (“Don’t most people falsely claim to be better than average?”).

** Dr. Joachim Krueger is a Professor in the Department of Cognitive, Linguistic, and Psychological Sciences at Brown University (USA).