Strategic thinking in the shadow of self-enhancement: Benefits and costs

Abstract

Using a variant of the hide-and-seek game, we show in two studies that self-enhancement can help or hinder strategic thinking. In the game, players either choose a number or attempt to guess that number. They can do so by randomizing or by active thinking. Guessers profit from thinking of a number, whereas choosers suffer from it. Yet, irrespective of their role, respondents prefer to actively think of a number when the opponent thinks. Participants believe they can outthink an opponent and most even prefer to play the game in the chooser’s role, thus neglecting the guesser’s statistical advantage. These findings suggest that the impacts of self-enhancement on strategic thinking are robust, presenting both risks (for the chooser) and opportunities (for the guesser). We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of strategic cognition and applications to real-life contexts.

A Robust Negative Relationship Between Self-Reports of Social Skills and Performance Measures of Social Intelligence

“…Past research on self-presentation and social judgment has viewed self-enhancement through a game theoretic lens (Krueger et al 2020;Heck & Krueger, 2015;Grüning & Krueger, 2022). There are some related implications of our results both for strategic interpersonal behavior and construct measurement.…”

Inductive reasoning model

“…The second derived measure addresses the common finding of selfenhancement. Although there are numerous conceptualizations of self-enhancement and many measurement approaches (Grüning & Krueger, 2021;2022;Krueger & Wright, 2011), the most common idea comes from the social-comparison framework, which says that self-enhancers are those who think they are better (i.e., have more positive and fewer negative traits) than the average person (see Zell et al, 2020 for meta-analytic effect size estimates across domains and measurement approaches). Although cognitive accounts of selfenhancement exist (Moore & Small, 2007), the dominant view is that people actively seek to create a positive differential between themselves and others (Brown, 2012;Zell & Alicke, 2010).…”

Advanced testing of the LoT hypothesis by social reasoning

“…6.2) is compelling in its experimental context, it is not far-reaching enough, that is, it is only weakly informative about the actual socially embedded reasoning of individuals. What is missing is a conceptual test of the LoT hypothesis in real-life social situations of logical reasoning – for example, such situations prevalent in research on competitive or collaborative games and strategic thinking (e.g., Colman, 2003; Grüning & Krueger, 2021, 2022; Hedden & Zhang, 2002). Realistic social situations of reasoning are different to the cases addressed by Quilty-Dunn et al in several aspects.…”