Regulating Impressions of Others to Affirm Images of the Self

by David Dunning and Keith S. Beauregard

Social Cognition (Volume 18, Issue 2, pp. 198–222) 2000
  • Psychology

People tailor their judgments of others to affirm images they possess of themselves. If this assertion is correct, people with favorable self-views should judge others in ways that aggrandize their own skills, but those with unfavorable self-views should not. We conducted an experiment in which participants with positive or negative views of their social skills took a test that purportedly measured those skills, achieving either a high or low score in the process. They then judged the social skills of a person who had achieved a moderately high score and one who had achieved a moderately low score. Positive self-view participants showed evidence of self-aggrandizement. Positive self-view participants who posted low performances themselves rated both targets as high, thus protecting their favorable images of self. Positive self-view participants who achieved high scores themselves extolled the skills of the high-performing target but denigrated the skills of the low-performing one, thus heightening the uniqueness of their own achievement. Participants with negative self-views showed no such self-aggrandizing pattern.