Ethan Zell

Do People Have Insight Into Their Abilities? A Metasynthesis

Having insight into one’s abilities is essential, yet it remains unclear whether people generally perceive their skills accurately or inaccurately. In the present analysis, we examined the overall correspondence between self-evaluations of ability (e.g., academic ability, intelligence, language competence, medical skills, sports ability, and vocational skills) and objective performance measures (e.g., standardized test scores, grades, and supervisor evaluations) across 22 meta-analyses, in addition to considering factors that moderate this relationship. Although individual meta-analytic effects ranged from .09 to .63, the mean correlation between ability self-evaluations and performance outcomes across meta-analyses was moderate (M = .29, SD = .11). Further, the relation was stronger when self-evaluations were specific to a given domain rather than broad and when performance tasks were objective, familiar, or low in complexity. Taken together, these findings indicate that people have only moderate insight into their abilities but also underscore the contextual factors that enable accurate self-perception of ability.

Culpable Control and Counterfactual Reasoning in the Psychology of Blame

Many counterfactual reasoning studies assess how people ascribe blame for harmful actions. By itself, the knowledge that a harmful outcome could easily have been avoided does not predict blame. In three studies, the authors showed that an outcomes mutability influences blame and related judgments when it is coupled with a basis for negative evaluations. Study 1 showed that mutability influenced blame and compensation judgments when a physician was negligent but not when the physician took reasonable precautions to prevent harm. Study 2 showed that this finding was attenuated when the victim contributed to his own demise. In Study 3, whether an actor just missed arriving on time to see his dying mother or had no chance to see her influenced his blameworthiness when his reason for being late provided a basis for negative evaluations but made no difference when there was a positive reason for the delay. These findings clarify the conditions under which an outcomes mutability is likely to influence blame and related attributions.

Contextual neglect, self-evaluation, and the frog-pond effect.

Social comparisons entail not only information about ones standing in a social group (intragroup or local comparison) but also information about the standing of the group in comparison to other groups (intergroup or general comparison). In Studies 1-3, the authors explored the relative impact of intergroup and intragroup comparisons on self-evaluations and affect. While intragroup comparison feedback consistently impacted self-evaluations and affect, intergroup comparison information exerted a significant impact only when intragroup comparison information was unavailable. The authors refer to this general tendency as contextual neglect. Studies 4 and 5 showed that contextual neglect is due primarily to the fact that low-level, local comparison information displaces or supersedes the effect of higher level, general comparison data and that people clearly recognize the superior diagnosticity of higher level comparisons while continuing to rely on small, haphazard sample data to evaluate their ability.

The Local Dominance Effect in Self-Evaluation: Evidence and Explanations

The local dominance effect is the tendency for comparisons with a few, discrete individuals to have a greater influence on self-assessments than comparisons with larger aggregates. This review presents a series of recent studies that demonstrate the local dominance effect. The authors offer two primary explanations for the effect and consider alternatives including social categorization and the abstract versus concrete nature of local versus general comparisons. They then discuss moderators of the effect including physical proximity and self-enhancement. Finally, the theoretical and practical implications of the effect are discussed and potential future directions in this research line are proposed.

Mere Categorization and the Frog-Pond Effect

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.

You may think you’re right…Young adults are more liberal than they realize

Do people have biased perceptions of their political orientation? Based on the link between political conservatism and in-group loyalty, we predicted that people would underestimate their liberalism and that this effect would be more pronounced among political conservatives. Young adults indicated their self-perceived political orientation and completed an objective measure of political orientation, which placed them along a liberal-conservative continuum by comparing their attitudes on 12 core issues (e.g., gay marriage, welfare) to population norms. Participants showed a significant bias toward perceiving themselves as more conservative than they actually were, and this effect was more pronounced among independents and conservatives than liberals. Further, biased self-perceptions of political orientation predicted voting behavior in the 2012 Presidential Election after controlling for objective political orientation scores. Discussion highlights theoretical implications for self-knowledge research and practical implications for American politics more broadly.

Social Self-Analysis: Constructing, Protecting, and Enhancing the Self

Abstract Social self-analysis is the process by which people use comparison information to define and modify their self-concepts or identity images. Self-concepts are beliefs about one’s abilities, attitudes, emotions, and behavior tendencies that range from relatively concrete to abstract in a self-knowledge hierarchy. Comparison information includes contrasting one’s own task and social feedback with others’ or with past and future states of one’s own or others’. We use an analogy with psychometric test theory to highlight the features of social self-analysis and view these comparisons as comparison tests that people encounter or conduct to assess their self-concepts. Comparison test feedback is assessed for its reliability, validity, and generalizability and is abstracted to low- to high-level self-concepts. Accurate translation from comparison test feedback to self-concepts is hindered by the absence of adequate comparison samples, the tendency to eschew large-scale comparison data for local comparisons (what we call “local dominance”), and by the desire to construct and maintain favorable identity images.

Cultural differences in attitudes toward action and inaction: The role of dialecticism.

The current research examined whether nations differ in their attitudes toward action and inaction. It was anticipated that members of dialectical East Asian societies would show a positive association in their attitudes toward action/inaction. However, members of non-dialectical European-American societies were expected to show a negative association in their attitudes toward action/inaction. Young adults in 19 nations completed measures of dialectical thinking and attitudes toward action/inaction. Results from multi-level modeling showed, as predicted, that people from high dialecticism nations reported a more positive association in their attitudes toward action and inaction than people from low dialecticism nations. Furthermore, these findings remained after controlling for cultural differences in individualism-collectivism, neuroticism, gross-domestic product, and response style. Discussion highlights the implications of these findings for action/inaction goals, dialecticism, and culture.

Does personality predict health and well-being? A metasynthesis.

Objective: To derive a robust and comprehensive estimate of the overall relation between Big Five personality traits and health variables using metasynthesis (i.e., second-order meta-analysis). Method: Thirty-six meta-analyses, which collectively provided 150 meta-analytic effects from over 500,000 participants, met criteria for inclusion in the metasynthesis. Information on methodological quality as well as the type of health outcome, unreliability adjustment, population sampled, health outcome source, personality source, and research design was extracted from each meta-analysis. An unweighted model was used to aggregate data across meta-analyses. Results: When entered simultaneously, the Big Five traits were moderately associated with overall health (multiple R = .35). Personality–health relations were larger when examining mental health outcomes than physical health outcomes or health-related behaviors and when researchers adjusted for measurement unreliability, used self-report as opposed to other-report Big Five scales, or focused on clinical as opposed to nonclinical samples. Further, effects were larger among agreeableness, conscientiousness, and neuroticism than extraversion or openness to experience. Conclusions: This metasynthesis provides among the most compelling evidence to date that personality predicts overall health and well-being. In addition, it may inform research on the mechanisms by which personality impacts health as well as research on the structure of personality.

Local dominance in health risk perception

Local comparisons with a few people displace the influence of general comparisons with many people during self-evaluation of performance and ability. The current research examined whether this local dominance effect obtains in the domain of health risk perception, an outcome of critical importance given its direct relation to preventative health behaviours. Participants received manipulated feedback indicating that their risk of diabetes (Study 1) or a serious car accident (Study 2) ranked above average or below average relative to numerous peers. Additionally, some participants were told that their risk ranked highest or lowest relative to a few peers. Participants evaluated their risk as significantly higher when they only knew that it ranked above average than below average. However, this effect was eliminated among participants who received additional local comparison information. These findings highlight the potential biasing influence of local comparison on everyday health judgment and behaviour.