1. Running header: SELF-ENHANCEMENT<br />Self-Enhancement: <br />Interaction of Self-Enhancement Styles with Basic Traits and Motives<br />Annie Hagen<br />University of Minnesota<br />Psychology 5207<br />17 December 2009<br />Abstract<br />Here I discuss self-enhancement and differentiated between self-deception and impression management. A major implication to self-enhancements is the biased results of personality assessments within personality and social psychology. These can skew results, and this should be considered when handling personality questionnaires. Self-deception is an unconscious act where an individual enhances their abilities and is characterized as overconfident. Impression management is a conscious act where an individual will enhance himself or herself to become more social desirable. Then I make the distinction between egotistic bias and moralistic biases. I conclude by discussing the regularities and consistencies in self-enhancement through the dispositional and situational strategies. <br />Throughout psychology, the idea that the mind contains more information than is realized is an important aspect when studying personality and social psychology. Some information in our mind is involuntarily hidden from a person’s consciousness, and then there is the case when information is voluntarily hidden. This is what happens when an individual engages in self-enhancement. <br />A person has reason to be self-enhancing in order to preserve their expectations or beliefs. Persons’ day-to-day behavior is largely goal-directed with long-term and short-term goals. When these goals or expectations are interrupted unexpectedly disrupting their progress toward their goal, then there is reason to be self-enhancing to protect their self-concept. <br />A major source of self-report bias affecting the validity of experimental and survey research findings is when participants seek to self-enhance. This is the case when individuals will engage in self-enhancement through self-deception or impression management. Many techniques and measures have been taken to decrease this effect, but research has shown that it is difficult to distinguish between those who are self-enhancing and those who truly fit those characteristics. Still a large number of studies have shown that self-enhancement may serious effect data in the laboratory and in surveys. Here I will present research on self-enhancement differentiating between self-deception and impression management. Then I will explain regularities and consistencies with self-enhancement through the dispositional and situational strategy. This will hopefully be help in understanding self-enhancement, and help further research correct self-enhancement biases correctly.<br />Self-enhancement is the notion of a person enhancing him or herself to be seen as more desirable to others. Self-enhancement is often a defense mechanism that an individual will exercise to protect his or her own self-concept. Individuals need to feel that others approve of them or that others respect them in order to enhance their own self-concept. Self-enhancement can be differentiated between self-deception and impression management CITATION Pau981 1033 (Paulhus & John, 1998). <br />Self-deception is essentially failure to explore evidence that one might be in error. This happens when evidence that something is wrong with their beliefs or plans is ignored and the person continues to do the wrong behavior. By ignoring these error messages and assuming no change is needed, then a person is being self-deceptive CITATION Jor03 1033 (Peterson, DeYoung, Seguin, Higgins, & Arseneault, 2003). <br />Self-deception can also be thought of as perseveration. Which is when someone will refuse to see another, better way of doing a task just in order to hold onto his or her previous beliefs. It is an act of preserving the old way and not adopting a new way. This has many implications to a person’s life, such as poorer performance after failure because a person will refuse to see that their way is wrong. CITATION Jor03 Jor03 1033 (Peterson, DeYoung, Seguin, Higgins, & Arseneault, 2003; Peterson, DeYoung, Seguin, Higgins, & Arseneault, 2003)<br />Gur & Sackeim (1979) state four criteria as necessary for ascribing self-deception and are as following: the individual holds two contradictory beliefs, these two contradictory beliefs are held simultaneously, the individual is not aware of holding one of these beliefs, and the act that determines which belief is and which belief is not subject to awareness is a motivated act. Paulhus (1991) created a Self-Deception Enhancement (SDE) to measure self-deception. The SDE measures rigid overconfidence, lack of self-insight, and reluctance to admit to personal limitations, and overconfidence. CITATION Ber07 1033 (Berry, Page, & Sackett, 2007). Finally, in the self-deception literature, narcissism has been linked to an egoistic bias and, specifically, the Big Five traits of extraversion and openness (Paulhus & John, 1998). <br />Impression management is a conscious effort to control the impressions that others may hold. It is goal-directed attempts to influence the perceptions of other persons. An individual must establish and maintain impressions that are congruent with perceptions they have previously conveyed CITATION Bro88 1033 (Brown, Collins, & Schmidt, 1988). Furthermore, a person will intentionally display socially desirable characteristics, such characteristics that are Saint-like.<br />The Impression Management scale is a measure designed to tap purposeful tailoring of responses to impress the audience CITATION Pau981 1033 (Paulhus & John, 1998). The Self-Deceptive Enhancement Scale measures the unconscious bias in self-descriptions. These two together form the Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding, which measures social desirability.<br />There is an important distinction between impression management and self-deception with one being a conscious bias and the other is an unconscious bias. Research has shown that self-deception enhancement is an unconscious motivated distortion, whereas impression management is consciously sensitive to situational demands CITATION Pau981 1033 (Paulhus & John, 1998). Impression management is when a person will intentionally fake something that is social desirable. On the other side, self-deception is when someone fakes something but truly believes that they posses the more desirable qualities than is actually true.<br />With this distinction, research has discovered that motivations for self-deception and impression management are significantly different. Within each category are two different categories of the traits that people exaggerate, which are an egoistic bias or a moralistic bias. An egoistic bias is a self-deceptive tendency to exaggerate one’s social and intellectual status CITATION Pau981 1033 (Paulhus & John, 1998). Self-deception leads to unrealistically positive self-perceptions on traits such as dominance, fearlessness, and intelligence. People who score high on self-deception have a narcissistic or a “superhero” perception of themselves. Moralistic bias is presenting oneself as more morally upstanding. They would describe themselves with “Saint” attributes. <br />Therefore, individuals with different personalities and individuals in different situations will engage in different biases for self-enhancement. Individuals that are higher in extraversion and openness tend to engage in self-deception, because they are motivated to enhance their self-image but not necessarily to improve their moral standings. On the other hand, individuals high in agreeableness and conscientiousness will engage in impression management to make a conscious effort to improve their moralistic image to others. <br />Self-enhancement can be conceptualized as a personality style and there exists two themes of personal growth (extraversion and openness) and socialization (agreeableness, conscientiousness, and emotional stability) within the Big Five personality traits CITATION Pau03 1033 (Pauls & Stemmler, 2003). By their nature, egotistic biases are enlightened sense of intellect, social competence, or superiority would leave me to hypothesis that these people are will posses personal growth traits of Extraversion and Openness. And individuals that show moralistic biases would show socialization traits, high in Agreeableness and Conscientiousness.<br />The dispositional strategy is one in which an individual’s actions are due to their dispositions, and strives to understand the behavior in terms of dispositions. Furthermore, this strategy seeks domains in which to have regularities and consistencies. When considering the behavior of self-enhancement including both impression management and self-deception, the dispositional strategy asks which dispositions will predict consistencies with self-enhancement. <br />A core psychological process of approval seeking is one in which individuals seek socially desirable options, that most of the time are unattainable by most. The Marlowe-Crowne Social Desirability Scale was made to measure the need for approval, and I hypothesis that individuals that score high on this would engage in self-enhancement. <br />In addition, individuals with the need for approval would engage in specifically impression management, because they seek out social approval. These individuals will also score high on agreeableness and conscientiousness, because these are the “Saints” who will heighten their saint like characteristics to be more socially desirable.<br />On the other hand, individuals that score high on need for Power such as Machiavellianism will most likely show regularities and consistencies in egotistic biases. These individuals will enhance their power, intelligence, and importance. This is a narcissistic view of oneself. This is mainly done unconsciously; in which individuals with high need for power or high in Machiavellianism just honestly feel that they are better than others. It is a very egotistic view on life.<br />One characteristic of Machiavellianism is that individuals often score low in social desirability and do not think being manipulative or controlling is socially desirable. Which fits with self-deception, because self-deception is a self-favoring bias in extraversion and openness. Individuals high in the need for power or Machiavellianism may feel that they are superior and that they are open to experiences and extraverted because these are positive traits to have. <br />The interactional Strategy uses moderators to find regularities and consistencies in behavior, by looking which traits, people, situations, and behaviors. Since the interactional strategy is lacking in unifying personality and situation it is difficult to describe moderators that would predict consistent self-enhancing behavior. The reason for this is because self-enhancing is deeply embedded into an individual’s personality and it calls for a particular situation for it to be sought out. Because of this, I have chosen not to look at the interactional strategy because I do not feel it is constructive in describing regularities and consistencies in self-enhancement.<br />The situational strategy is one that finds regularities and consistencies in behavior by looking into the situations that an individual chooses or influences. In this strategy an individual’s personality is the independent variable, which predicts the situation, the dependent variable. As I stated before, self-enhancement is divided into two categories with two different sets of dispositions: self-deception comes from need for power or Machiavellianism, and impression management comes from need for approval. So, with these distinctions then the situational strategy would ask which situations would each personality type choose or influence. <br />I hypothesis that individuals high in the need for approval would choose situations where they would where they were view as a “Saint” by others. These might be situations in a church setting by chance, or maybe they would want to volunteer so that others would view them as a socially desirable. Individuals with the need for power or that are high in Machiavellianism would choose situations where they are able to enforce power upon others. These individuals may choose a career as a manager or high position so they may have power on others. They may also choose situations where they are in a group of less power enthusiastic individuals so that he is able to be powerful over them. <br />This could also been seen when individuals high in self-enhancement choosing situations that are in line with their attitudes. An individual high in Machiavellianism, who has an egotistic bias, will want to choose situations where they are able to be “Superheroes.” Meaning they will avoid situations where their attitudes about themselves may be discouraged or rejected. The same is for individuals high in the need for approval who have moralistic biases. They will choose situations where they can uphold their personal attitudes that they are a “Saint.” These individuals will avoid situations were they are not able to have those attitudes about themselves.<br />Another aspect of the situational strategy is when individuals will influence their situation to match their personality. This is very relevant for those who self-enhance, because they have an enhanced view of themselves and want it to match with their behavior and with what others believe about them. If there is a congruency between any of the three aspects, self, behavior, or person, the individual will go through some sort of change to make these aspects congruent. <br />One-way in which a self-enhancing individual my create congruency is to go through cognitive restructuring. Individuals might discount the negative comments that others say, and purposefully misinterpret other people’s feedback then block it out. For self-deception and impression management, individuals will block out the negative feedback, restructure it so that it matches their personal beliefs about themselves. For example, a person who seeks out the need for power, who has egotistic biases towards themselves will ignore any comments that tell them they are inferior, less intelligent, or anything that would reduce their sense of power.<br />They may also seek out behavioral confirmation. Behavioral confirmation happens when: there is motivation for the perceiver to influence the target, when there are expectations for the perceiver which then effects how the target acts, and if the perceiver has the power. The perceiver is the self-enhancer who believes they are either “Saints” or “Superheroes” and they wish for the target to believe the same. When the perceiver or self-enhancer is in control their expectations and motivations of their self-concept will influence the target to believe the same. The target will sense who the person believes they are, and will in turn believe it and treat them as “Saints” or “Superheroes.” In this example, the “Saints” or “Superheroes” behavior will confirm to others that in fact that is who they are. This is of course, until they realize the perceiver is self-enhancing. <br />An implication of self-enhancing is the concern of a narcissistic lifestyle of an individual. Narcissism is characterized by an enlightened sense of self-importance, a tendency to exaggerate accomplishments, and an expectation to be special CITATION Pau981 1033 (Paulhus & John, 1998). Narcissistic individuals exaggerate their self-image in defense of others judgments, in which they use self-enhancement. More specifically they are self-deceptive, meaning they are unconsciously enhancing their self-worth. Interestingly, narcissistic individuals do participate in forms of desirable responding, such as impression management CITATION Pau981 1033 (Paulhus & John, 1998).<br />There is also the issue of self-report bias due to defensiveness of the self-leading to self-enhancement. Though Costa & McCrae (1992) have found that most social desirability scales fail to distinguish between individuals who falsely present themselves as having desirable traits and those who actually posses those traits. They state the dangers of mistakenly distrusting valid self-reports, and that it makes much more sense to believe all participants. Furthermore, the success of assessment depends the clinicians’ ability to elicit the patient’s trust and cooperation, and Costa & McCrae (1992) recommends explaining the important ways in which individuals differ and honest responses are important to the success of the evaluation.<br />Though there still leaves the problem of an unconscious bias. Making clients aware of their moralistic biases to be more agreeable with positive statements, may encourage more truthful answers, I doubt this is the case with egotistic biases. Since, egotistic biases are described as self-deceptive and primarily unconscious it will be difficult for a researcher to account for or control these biases. Which, is why it is so important to understand tendencies for self-deception in research. <br />I have summarized here that self-enhancing is an important implication in research studies because these individuals have skewed interpretations of themselves. Some researchers believe this can affect the outcome of their studies and should be considered when assessing personality analysis. Furthermore, I discussed the two aspects of self-enhancement as either self-deception or impression management and their differentiating self-deceptive mechanisms. Then I concluded by examining the how the dispositional and situational strategies find regularities and consistencies in self-enhancers. Self-enhancing is still a phenomena within personality and social psychology; further studying will find more implications.<br />References<br />Berry, C., Page, R., & Sackett, P. (2007). Effects of Self-Deceptive Enhancement on Personality and job performance relationships. International Journal of Selection and Assessment .<br />Brown, J., Collins, R., & Schmidt, G. (1988). Self-Esteem and Direct vs. Indirect Forms of Self-Enhancement. Journal of Personailty and Social Psychology .<br />Campbel, K., Rudich, E., & Sedikides, C. (2002). Narcissism, Self-Esteem, and the Positivity of Self-Views: Two Portraits of Self-Love. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin .<br />Costa, P., & McCrae, R. (1992). Normal Personality Assessment in Clinical Practice: The NEO Personality Inventory. Psychological Assessment .<br />Gur, R., & Sackeim, H. (1979). 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