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Findings from research on self-enhancement and self-protection are generally understood to provide evidence for “motivated bias.” Despite their ubiquity, the meaning of “motivation,” “bias,” and “motivated bias” are usually left to intuition. In this article, we clarify the meaning of these terms as they apply to constructing and maintaining desired self-views. We argue that preserving psychological homeostasis (i.e., emotional equilibrium) is as important as preserving biological homeostasis, and indeed, that psychological and biological homeostasis are two aspects of one overarching balancing principle. We argue further that, although maintaining a favorable identity can sometimes lead to errors from normative models, the bias toward sustaining psychological homeostasis is just as adaptive as the bias toward sustaining a properly functioning physiology.

The better-than-average-effect (BTAE) is the tendency for people to perceive their abilities, attributes, and personality traits as superior compared with their average peer. This article offers a comprehensive review of the BTAE and the first quantitative synthesis of the BTAE literature. We define the effect, differentiate it from related phenomena, and describe relevant methodological approaches, theories, and psychological mechanisms. Next, we present a comprehensive meta-analysis of BTAE studies, including data from 124 published articles, 291 independent samples, and more than 950,000 participants. Results indicated that the BTAE is robust across studies (dz = 0.78, 95% CI [0.71, 0.84]), with little evidence of publication bias. Further, moderation tests suggested that the BTAE is larger in the case of personality traits than abilities, positive as opposed to negative dimensions, and in studies that (a) use the direct rather than the indirect method, (b) involve many rather than few dimensions, (c) sample European Americans rather than East-Asians (especially for individualistic traits), and (d) counterbalance self and average peer judgments. Finally, the BTAE is moderately associated with self-esteem (r = .34) and life satisfaction (r = .33). Results from selection model analyses clarify areas of the BTAE literature in which publication bias may be of elevated concern. Discussion highlights theoretical and empirical implications. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Previous research indicates that local comparisons with one or a few people in the immediate environment have a stronger influence on self-evaluations than general comparisons with larger samples. Two studies examined whether this local dominance effect extends to intrinsic motivation. Study 1 suggests that local comparisons have a stronger effect on both self-evaluations and task enjoyment than general comparisons. Study 2 suggests that local comparisons have a stronger effect on intrinsic motivation than general comparisons and that local comparisons have a significant indirect effect on persistence via intrinsic motivation. Altogether, the present findings are among the first to demonstrate the contribution of local social comparisons to intrinsic motivation. We highlight the implications of these findings for social comparison theories.

Understanding the causes of human behavior is essential for advancing one’s interests and for coordinating social relations. The scientific study of how people arrive at such understandings or explanations has unfolded in four distinguishable epochs in psychology, each characterized by a different metaphor that researchers have used to represent how people think as they attribute causality and blame to other individuals. The first epoch was guided by an “intuitive scientist” metaphor, which emphasized whether observers perceived behavior to be caused by the unique tendencies of the actor or by common reactions to the requirements of the situation. This metaphor was displaced in the second epoch by an “intuitive lawyer” depiction that focused on the need to hold people responsible for their misdeeds. The third epoch was dominated by theories of counterfactual thinking, which conveyed a “person as reconstructor” approach that emphasized the antecedents and consequences of imagining alternatives to events, especially harmful ones. With the current upsurge in moral psychology, the fourth epoch emphasizes the moral-evaluative aspect of causal judgment, reflected in a “person as moralist” metaphor. By tracing the progression from the person–environment distinction in early attribution theories to present concerns with moral judgment, our goal is to clarify how causal constructs have been used, how they relate to one another, and what unique attributional problems each addresses.

In Thomas Hardy's classic Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the heroine is an utterly blameless woman whose “offense” is to have been raped by a member of the family she has been sent to live with in hope...

Does awareness of female body ideals affect women's global self-esteem? We measured awareness of ideal standards for beauty via two approaches. As one approach, participants (55 undergraduate women) self-reported their general propensity to be aware of society's thin ideal standard. As a second approach, we measured visual attention orienting to ideal standards; we covertly measured participants' eye movements to peers' purported ideal standards. Self-reported awareness predicted lower baseline self-esteem; this relationship was mediated by internalization of the thin ideal. Awareness as assessed through attention orienting to peers' ideal standards predicted decreases in global self-esteem, above the effects of self-reported awareness, internalization, and actual measures of physical fitness. Implications for awareness of ideal standards and the media's portrayal of the thin ideal are discussed.

As I prepare to type at the computer monitor situated in front of me, the television monitor to the right of me is reporting the story of a high-profile, alcoholic baseball player who recently expe...

The proposition that desires, needs, and goals influence people's thoughts, attitudes, and judgments is endemic to many social psychological theories. Researchers have continually struggled, however, to establish these motivational phenomena vis-a-vis alternative information-processing explanations. This struggle is necessitated by the difficulties that motivational theories have introduced throughout psychology's history. Instinct theories in the 1920s, for example, threatened to discourage investigation into other behavioral antecedents. Drive theories in the 1950s complicated functional behavioral laws and were difficult to confirm empirically. In fact, Skinner was able to forge a behavior theory that was arguably more powerful than those of his contemporaries while dispensing completely with motivational terms. Despite these difficulties, most psychologists, Skinnerians notwithstanding, have found the motivation concept indispensable. As the articles in this symposium demonstrate, motivational concepts are ascendant in social psychology. Social psychologists have deployed the motivation concept primarily to explain people's need to forge, maintain, or recoup positive self-concepts. In addition to self-enhancement and self-protection needs (Dunning, this issue), the authors in this symposium discuss the need to maintain favorable views of one's peers (Kunda & Sinclair, this issue) or relationship partners (Murray, this issue). Ultimately, these needs also subserve self-enhancement in that the desire to view close others positively accrues self-benefits. Having convincingly surmounted alternative explanations of motivational phenomena, researchers have begun to address the conditions in which different motives prevail. Sedikides and Strube (1995), for example, considered the circumstances under which four self-related motives-self-enhancement, self-verification, self-assessment, and self-improvement-are most likely to be activated. They assume, for example, that self-assessment needs predominate with highly diagnostic tasks, whereas self-enhancement prevails with ambiguous tasks. Presumably, diagnostic tasks enable accurate assessment of abilities and characteristics, whereas ambiguous tasks provide the latitude to define one's characteristics self-servingly. In addition to coordinating motives with situations, researchers have examined how different motives influence the kinds of information people seek. Taylor, Neter, and Wayment (1995), for example, showed that people seeking self-improvement tend to compare themselves with superior others, whereas those seeking self-enhancement prefer inferior comparison targets. In this article, I outline an expanded view of self-related motives couched in terms of six self-orientations. Self-orientations are evoked by challenges to the self s integrity or opportunities for self-advancement. The self-orientation perspective assumes that internal processes, such as thinking about one's behavior, characteristics, or circumstances, or external events, such as social or task feedback, evoke cognitive and emotional states that favor, but do not dictate, particular motivated strategies. A person who receives unfavorable social feedback, for example, may become sad, angry, or energized, leading to exceptional openness (e.g., self-evaluation or self-improvement motives) or defensiveness (e.g., self-verification or self-enhancement motives) in self-evaluations and social judgments. Whether a person favors relatively biased or unbiased selfand social judgments depends on the strength of the orientation, the type of information that is available to assess self and others, and personality factors. A single person may enter into different self-orientations within a relatively short time frame, and people vary in their chronic tendencies to occupy each self-orientation. The six basic self-orientations are the habitual self, the beleaguered self, the exalted self, the analytic self, the malleable self, and the existential self. The habitual self refers to people's usual selfand social judgment tendencies, whereas the other five orientations represent special self-threats or opportunities. In terms of the self-orientation approach, Kunda and Sinclair's target article in this issue describes circumstances in

The relative preference effect refers to the tendency for people with incompatible ethical views to differ in their evaluations of targets whose ethical decisions agree versus disagree with their own. For example, people who say they would keep a lost wallet ascribe less blame to a target who does the same than do people who say they would return the wallet. The relative preference effect does not require that people consider their ethical choices to be morally superior to the alternatives: The effect occurs even when people who endorse less ethically desirable alternatives (such as keeping a lost wallet) admit that the opposite alternative (such as returning the wallet) is more admirable or desirable, and also when they admit that they would teach their children to do the opposite. The two studies in this paper examined different explanations for the pervasiveness of the relative preference effect. Study 1 assessed the possibility that people evaluate targets who agree with them more favorably because they assume the targets' decisions will produce positive outcomes. Study 1 provided evidence against this interpretation by showing that the relative preference effect occurred when the target's decision produced negative as well as positive outcomes. Study 2 assessed the possibility that people evaluate agreeing others more favorably because they assume most people share their ethical preferences. This explanation was supported by a significant interaction between consensus information and agreement–disagreement information on blame attributions: The relative preference effect occurred when participants were provided with information indicating most of their peers agreed with their ethical decision, but not when they believed a majority of their peers disagreed.

Zell and Alicke (2009) have shown that comparisons with a few people have a stronger influence on self-evaluations than comparisons with larger samples. One explanation for this effect is that people readily categorize their standing in small groups as “good” or “bad,” which supersedes large-sample data. To test this explanation, we created a situation in which students learned that their performance ranked 5th or 6th out of 10 persons on a task. In each experimental session, two groups, each containing 5 people, were created by random assignment. Some students learned that their performance placed them last in one group of 5, and some learned that they were first in the other group of 5. In the other conditions, participants learned only that that they were 5th or 6th in the group of 10. Results showed that being last in the superior group led to lower self-evaluations than being first in the inferior group.

A culpable control model is advanced to describe the conditions that encourage as well as mitigate blame and to assess the process by which blame and mitigation occur. The fundamental assumptions of the model are that evidence concerning harmful events is scrutinized for its contribution to personal control and spontaneously evaluated for its favorableness or unfavorableness. Spontaneous evaluations encourage a blame-validation mode of processing in which evidence concerning the event is reviewed in a manner that favors ascribing blame to the person or persons who evoke the most negative affect or whose behavior confirms unfavorable expectations. The author delineates the elements of perceived control and then discusses spontaneous evaluation influences on control and blame assessments. The blame-validation process is described next. Finally, the culpable control model is compared with extant theories of blame and responsibility and its basic tenets summarized.

This study tested the hypothesis that the efficacy of a person-schema as an information processing structure will depend on the appropriateness of the schema for the information (i.e., how well the schema fits the information). We manipulated schema appropriateness by asking subjects to evaluate a positive or negative target (target valence), while comparing her either to themselves, or to someone they knew well and liked, or knew well and disliked (schema focus). We hypothesized that the self and the liked-other would be appropriate schemas for the positive target, while the disliked-other would be appropriate for the negative target. A subsequent test of incidental recall of the target information yielded the predicted interaction between target valence and schema focus (i.e., the positive target was remembered better when compared to the liked-other and the negative target was remembered better when compared to the disliked-other). This difference did not, however, extend to self-focus, which produced equivalent recall of positive and negative targets. The implications of these findings for the self as a unique schema are discussed.

Existing research on the relative efficacy of the self as an encoding structure applies more to the self as an object than as a cognitive structure that guides the organization of incoming information. In order to provide a task that would be more directly relevant to encoding, subjects were asked to watch an interview of a resident assistant (RA) candidate by the housing department and to attend throughout to how similar the candidate's presentation was to the one they themselves or a typical RA would have given in the situation. Furthermore, judgments of similarity were divided into personality, ability, and nonverbal style. The dependent variable was a surprise cued-recall task, administered 20 min after the videotaped interview had ended. Consistent with prediction, subjects instructed to encode from a self-perspective exhibited better recall than those instructed to encode from a typical RA perspective. Also, as predicted, subjects who judged personality or ability similarity recalled more of the interview than those who judged nonverbal style similarity. Enhanced recall from the self-encoding perspective was consistent across all three types of judgments (personality, ability, nonverbal style), suggesting that the self is an efficient processing structure across a variety of diverse judgment topics.