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With issues such as shrinking revenue, access to care, faculty workloads, and graying faculty, dental schools are faced with difficult challenges that fall to dental school deans to manage. Do dental school deans have the organizational skill sets and ethical frameworks necessary to address the challenges now facing dental schools? The purpose of this article is to pose questions and suggestions regarding some of the key issues in dental colleges today and to stimulate discussion in the dental community about needed changes in dental education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Four experiments demonstrate that self-knowledge provides a mixed blessing in behavioral prediction, depending on how accuracy is measured. Compared with predictions of others, self-knowledge tends to decrease overall accuracy by increasing bias (the mean difference between predicted behavior and reality) but tends to increase overall accuracy by also enhancing discrimination (the correlation between predicted behavior and reality). Overall, participants' self-predictions overestimated the likelihood that they would engage in desirable behaviors (bias), whereas peer predictions were relatively unbiased. However, self-predictions also were more strongly correlated with individual differences in actual behavior (discrimination) than were peer predictions. Discussion addresses the costs and benefits of self-knowledge in behavioral prediction and the broader implications of measuring judgmental accuracy of judgment in terms of bias versus discrimination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Three studies explored the relative roles of the self and self-serving definitions of social traits in social judgment. In Study 1, participants evaluated the applications of prospective college admittees more favorably when those applicants shared their own competencies, even after general liking for these applicants had been controlled statistically. In Study 2, participants tended to describe the leadership styles of famous leaders (e.g., Martin Luther King, Jr.) but not nonleaders as similar to their own. In Study 3, participants completed measures of self-description, trait definition, and social judgment. Self-serving trait definitions completely explained the relation between the self and social judgment. Together, these findings suggest that self-serving trait definitions are not epiphenomenal but rather play an important role, independent of the self, in judgments of others. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

von Hippel & Trivers's central assertion that people self-deceive to better deceive others carries so many implications that it must be taken to the laboratory to be tested, rather than promoted by more indirect argument. Although plausible, many psychological findings oppose it. There is also an evolutionary alternative: People better deceive not through self-deception, but rather by not caring about the truth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Krueger & Funder (K&F) could have gone further to sketch out a more comprehensive vision of "balanced" psychology. The triumphs and travails of other sciences (e.g., economics) provide clues about the advantages and pitfalls of pursuing such an approach. Perhaps introducing more positivity into psychology may involve asking how people can do better, not how well they do already. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]