Managing Self Image

Learning Objectives:

• Summarize the cognitive strategies we use to enhance and protect our self-image

• Describe how self-esteem influences the ways we seek to maintain positive self-regard

• Describe the types of threats that lead people to enhance or protect their self-esteem

Cognitive strategies:

1. Social Comparison

2. Self-serving Attributions

3. Unrealistic Optimism

4. Exaggerating Strengths/Minimizing Weaknesses

Social Comparison: comparing ourselves to others

• Upward social comparison (comparing ourselves to someone better off)

  • To gather information and motivate improvements (e.g., a student struggling in SOP 3004 looking at a top performing student and studying their habits)

• Downward social comparison(comparing ourselves to someone worse off)

  • Boosts self-esteem so we feel better about ourselves (e.g., doing bad on an exam and remembering a friend who failed the test entirely)

Self-Serving Attributions: explaining events in ways that protect our self-image

• Self serving bias: take personal credit for your success and blame external forces for failures(e.g., a basketball player crediting their hard work when winning but blaming the referee for a loss.)

  • Self serving biases can lead to self-handicapping

    • Create obstacles so that there is an excuse (outside of the self) for why we did poorly (e.g., a student went out the night before an exam, when failed they can say “Well I didn’t even study,” instead of admitting they struggled)

• The “Better Than Average Effect” (Dunning-Krueger Effect)

  • not everyone can be above average (e.g., someone with little to no singing skills insisting their better than most contestants on American Idol)

Unrealistic Optimism: overestimating positive outcomes, underestimating negative ones

• Tendency to overspend positive events about our future

• Tendency to underestimate negative events about our future

• e.g., someone who smokes daily believing they’ll never get lung cancer

Exaggerating Strengths/Minimizing Weaknesses: valuing what we’re good at and downplaying what we’re bad at

• Value characteristics/abilities you have

• De-value characteristics/abilities you don’t have

• e.g., a person who is bad at sports but good at academics says, “Physical ability doesn’t matter—intelligence is what really counts.”

Who is most likely to engage in self-enhancing strategies? (person factors)

• People with high self-esteem (protect the view they have)

  • Use upward and downward comparison strategies

  • Put down others

  • Exhibit the self-serving bias

• e.g., a confident CEO takes credit for a company’s success but blames the economy when profits decline.

• a person with high self-esteem compares themselves to others to feel superior

When do we engage in self-

enhancement strategies? (situation factors)

• Threats to self-esteem

  • Poor performance – “false feedback” in experiments (blaming the teacher for failing instead of our lack of studying)

  • Negative interpersonal feedback (taking someone’s criticism as “biased” or “jealous”

  • Mortality salience – awareness of our eventual demise (religious beliefs)