Effects of Standards on Self-Enhancing Interpretations of Ambiguous Social Comparison Information

Abstract

When people receive feedback about how they and others have performed on a task-feedback that should be interpreted as implying equivalent performance-they only seem to exhibit a self-enhancement bias (erroneously believing they have outperformed others) when feedback about others' performance is unambiguous and feedback about their own performance is ambiguous (Klein, 2001). They do so by distorting estimates of their own performance upward. In 2 studies, we show how 2 types of standards moderate this effect. In Experiment 1, we show that people distort ambiguous self-performance feedback in a self-enhancing direction only when they receive information about their own and others' performance at the same time. In Experiment 2, we found that when people hold neutral prior beliefs about their ability (an internal standard), they exhibit self-enhancement in their performance assessments whenever at least one source of information (self or other) is ambiguous. Despite the wealth of literature that has demonstrated self-enhancement biases, it appears that the emergence of this bias is bounded in theoretically interesting ways when people are faced with performance feedback.Imagine that a supervisor conducts performance appraisals for each of her four subordinates. One subordinate learns he has received scores of 41, 66, and 91 on the three components of the appraisal. He also happens to hear that his three coworkers received average scores of 78, 54, and 66 on the same three components. One week later, this employee is asked by a friend how well he performed on the overall appraisal relative to his coworkers. Despite the fact that his average score across the components was 66-identical to the mean performance of his peers-will his motivation to think he is better than average make him come to believe that his performance was superior? If so, might we still observe this bias if he did not receive the information about his coworkers' performance or received it much later? Moreover, would beliefs about his prior performance influence the likelihood of a self-enhancement bias? These questions concern the effects of two types of standards-the performance of others on the same task and beliefs about one's own task-related ability. The purpose of our investigation was to address the effect of each of these standards on the extent to which people distort ambiguous performance feedback in a self-favoring direction.

Error and Bias in Comparative Judgment: On Being Both Better and Worse Than We Think We Are

“…While comparative judgments in this condition do represent a significant reversal from the baseline in the no-feedback condition, the fact remains that, as Table 3 shows, those who get other-feedback in the easy condition do not report believing that they are worse than others. This fact is probably due to the additional effect, demonstrated by Klein (2001;Klein, Monin, Steers-Wentzell, & Buckingham, 2006), for self-enhancement motivations to exert the strongest effect on self-estimates when people have clear information about others' performances but lack information about their own performances. Nevertheless, the differential weighting explanation cannot account for the patter of BTA and WTA effects we observe in individual assessments, nor can it account for the close parallel between direct comparisons and individual assessments.…”

Error and bias in comparative judgment: On being both better and worse than we think we are.

“…Although comparative judgments in this condition do represent a significant reversal from the baseline in the no-feedback condition, the fact remains that, as Table 3 shows, those who got other feedback in the easy condition did not report believing that they were worse than others. This fact was probably due to the additional effect, demonstrated by Klein (2001; Klein, Monin, Steers-Wentzell, & Buckingham, 2006), that self-enhancement motivations exert the strongest effect on self-estimates when people have clear information about others' performances but lack information about their own performances. Nevertheless, the differential weighting explanation cannot account for the pattern of BTA and WTA effects we observe in individual assessments, nor can it account for the close parallel between direct comparisons and individual assessments.…”