LECTURE 7: SELF ILLUSIONS

Q: What are Positive Illusions according to Taylor & Brown (1988)?

A: Psychologically adaptive distortions maintained by normal, healthy individuals consisting of: (1) overestimating our good qualities and minimizing faults, (2) exaggerating our perceived personal control over life events, and (3) being unrealistically optimistic about the future.

Q: What is Depressive Realism?

A: The finding that mildly or moderately depressed individuals often judge themselves, their control, and their future prospects with greater objective accuracy than healthy individuals, who rely on self-enhancing positive illusions.

Q: What is the Better-Than-Average Effect?

A: The robust tendency for people to evaluate themselves as significantly above the statistical average on almost all socially desirable traits and abilities (e.g., intelligence, driving, kindness, fairness).

Q: What is Unrealistic Optimism (Weinstein, 1980)?

A: The systematic tendency for people to believe that they are personally more likely than their peers to experience positive life events (e.g., owning a home, living past 80) and less likely to experience negative events (e.g., divorce, heart attacks, crime victimization).

Q: What is the Illusion of Control (Langer, 1975)?

• A: The false belief that one can exert personal control over purely random or chance events, especially when tasks involve skill-like elements (such as throwing dice or choosing lottery tickets).

• Study Summary: Langer's lottery and betting studies showed that participants demanded much higher prices to sell lottery tickets they had personally chosen versus randomly assigned ones, and wagered more money when competing against a visibly nervous opponent.

Q: What is Von Hippel & Trivers’ (2011) Evolutionary Theory of Self-Deception?

A: Proposes that self-deception evolved because deceiving ourselves helps us deceive others more convincingly. By genuinely believing our own inflated claims, we eliminate physiological and behavioral micro-expressions of guilt or dishonesty.

Q: What are Self-Serving Category and Trait Definitions (David Dunning)?

A: The cognitive tendency to define broad social categories (e.g., "what makes a good friend") and abstract traits (e.g., "dependable") in idiosyncratic ways that favor our own personal strengths, allowing us to conclude we possess those high-value traits.

Q: What was the methodology and result of Beauregard & Dunning’s (1998) Egocentric Contrast Study?

A:

• Methodology: Cornell students received success or failure feedback on an intelligence test, read a stimulus description of a target student (Chris), and rated his intelligence.

• Results: When participants experienced ego threat (failure), they exhibited a strong egocentric contrast effect, evaluating the target's intelligence by contrasting it directly with their own performance to bolster their threatened self-image

Q: What is the Self-Serving Attribution Bias?

A: The overwhelming tendency to attribute personal successes to internal, dispositional factors ("I aced the test because I'm brilliant") while attributing failures to external, situational factors ("I failed because the exam was unfair").

Q: What is the Endori History Illusion (Quoidbach, Gilbert, & Wilson, 2013)?

A: The psychological tendency for people of all ages to underestimate how much their personality, values, and preferences will change over the next decade, falsely believing they have finally reached their "final finished self."