Self-perception of character

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Is it possible to evaluate the self accurately? - Analysis using the example of daily behavior
2.1 Daily behavior as an indicator for the character traits
2.2 Are people able to predict their daily behaviors? - An empirical study

3. Bias
3.1. Does bias occur because of an inaccurate self-evaluation or evaluation of others?
3.2. For what traits are the people likely to self-enhance?
3.3. Coherence between self-esteem and self-enhancement
3.4. Impact of self-enhancement

4. Discrimination
4.1. Definition of the term Discrimination
4.2. An empirical study on Discrimination

5. Conclusion

1. Introduction

Do you know who you are? Can you accurately predict how you will behave in a certain situation? What do you know about your character traits? Research has shown that most people think they themselves know they character better than anyone else and could predict their future and daily behavior more accurately than anyone else (Pronin, Kruger, Savitsky, &Ross, 2001; Vazire & Mehl, 2008). This sounds logical, because a person has accumulated lots of information about himself as well as experience during his whole life and has privileged access to his feelings and thoughts. But do these predictions correspond with the reality? Or are there motives that deform our self-evaluation? In this term paper I will analyze how we perceive ourselves, whether we accurately perceive our character traits and which factors influence our self-evaluation.

2. Is it possible to evaluate the self accurately? - Analysis using the example of daily behavior

2.1 Daily behavior as an indicator for the character traits

To measure whether a person evaluates his character traits accurately is quite difficult. Single laboratory-based and outcome measures do not reflect a person‘s typical behavior and therefore his character, because they depend on his physical and mental state on that day, outside influences etc. (Vazire & Mehl, 2008). Mehl, Gosling & Pennebaker (2006) found evidence that our personality is manifested in our daily life. They have also showed that people, to a certain extent, are able to accurately associate observed behavior with certain personality traits. In their research, the participants first completed several questionnaires. Those included the “44-item Big Five Inventory” designed to find out more about their character. The Big Five personality dimensions consist of Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Neuroticism. In the second phase participants had to wear an “Electronically Activated Recorder” (henceforth: EAR) for two days. The EAR is a voice recorder that periodically records sounds from a student‘s daily life. Those sounds later can be decoded. The sounds were presented to judges that had to give their opinion on a participant‘s personality traits referring to the Big Five. A correlation between student’s traits and expected behavior for these traits was found. For example, extroverted participants spent less time alone, they talked more and used more words. All in all, our daily behavior is a good indicator for our character traits. Judges’ opinions on students’ traits corresponded to the manifestations of the Big Five. That means that, for instance our friends are able to assess our traits when they observe our behavior.

2.2 Are people able to predict their daily behaviors? - An empirical study

As we see, peoples’ way to interact with their social environment says a lot about their character. Therefore, it is interesting to know whether a person himself - or rather his friends and family members - can accurately predict his daily behavior which is an indicator for his character. Is it even possible that a certain perspective gives rise to unique insight of certain behaviors and characteristics? Vazire & Mehl (2008) tested this hypothesis.

Method: Eighty undergraduate students at the age of 18 to 24 years participated in that study. In the first phase the investigators collected students’ self-reports. Therein, they had to rate how often they perform each of 20 given daily behaviors (e.g. laughing, singing, watching TV) compared with the average person on a 7-point Likert-type scale (1=much less than an average person; 7=much more). This approach is called the “Act Frequency Approach” (AFA) and it is argued that the listed behaviors are good indicators for peoples’ character.

In the second phase, the students had to name three individuals who know them well (if possible one closest friend, one romantic partner and one parent). Those people were contacted via the Internet and asked to complete a 110-item questionnaire about the participant‘s personality and behavior - again compared to the average person. The informant ratings were aggregated to one rating for each behavior. There was an average correlation of .32 for the agreement of the informant ratings and a correlation of .32 between self- and other-ratings.

In the third phase, the participants were told to wear the EAR for four days (Friday until Tuesday) during the waking hours as often as possible and only to remove it when it was necessary. The EAR was recording sounds every 12.5 minutes for 30 seconds to track the students’ current location (e.g. apartment, bar), activity (e.g. eating, listening to music), interaction (e.g. alone, talking to others), mood (e.g. laughing, crying). The students could not notice whether the EAR was on. After those four days, the students had the possibility to listen to the records and erase any part they wished. The students erased only 0.01% of the sounds. Moreover, they stated after the research that the EAR had only minor effects on their behavior.

Results: For all 20 behaviors an average correlation of .26 between ratings and target‘s behavior for both perspectives - the self and friends or relatives - was detected. Vazire & Mehl also compared single informants’ ratings to targets‘ behavior in order to assure that the

high correlation was not lifted just by the aggregated ratings. However, after the usage of single informants’ ratings there was still a high correlation of .23. That means that the self-and also the other-perspective were similarly accurate in predicting the target‘s behavior. Self-accuracy was observed in 13, and other-accuracy in 14 of all 20 behaviors. The table below (Table 1) provides the correlations between daily behavior and self-/ aggregated informants-/ single informants ratings.

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Table 1.Correlation between daily behavior and the ratings. Source: Vazire & Mehl, 2008

For some behaviors both perspectives were accurate, e.g. talking on the phone or spending time on the computer. For a few others none of the perspectives was accurate (spending time outdoor). However, for some other behaviors only one perspective provided unique insights. For example, only the targets themselves could predict how much they argue. Conversely, only the informants were able to estimate how often the targets tend to speak “one-on-one” with other people. We can conclude from these results that there are some sides of personality only accessible through one perspective. To visualize the differences, a Johari window was used. The x-axis describes the amount of self-knowledge and the y-axis describes the amount of other-knowledge (see Figure1). Dependent on these two variables the behaviors were classified into four quadrants (see Figure2). As we can see, the behaviors fall into all four quadrants.

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Figure 1. Johari window. Source: Vazire & Mehl, 2008

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Figure 2. Accuracy of self- and other-rating. Source:, Vazire & Mehl, 2008

Weakness of the study: Unfortunately, it was only possible to find acoustically detectable behaviors. Furthermore, there exist much more behaviors than the 20, which are named in Table 1. There are also a lot of other interesting behaviors on a higher level that show a person‘s personality, but that are not detectable through the EAR. A case in point would be helping other people. Moreover, the students were allowed to remove the EAR. Therefore, possibly not everything was recorded. Another weakness is that the participants were asked to compare the target to “the average person”. It is possible tha]t participants had different associations with “the average person”.

Summary: We see that the person isn‘t always the best judge of his own character. Others also have unique information about us. There are sides of our personality which we know well, but some behavior we cannot predict accurately, although we have the intuitive feeling that we posses great self-knowledge. How can this contradiction be explained? Why are we ourselves not more accurate than others? I will discuss these questions in the next two chapters, three and four.

3. Bias

Epley and Dunning (2006) suggest that there are two different forms of accuracy. One of them is Bias. It is the average simple difference between the predicted and actual extent of an examined variable. An example of this is the difference between the percentage of people who were predicted to show a certain behavior and percentage of those who really showed it. They show that bias in self-evaluation occurs, because by predicting our own behavior we prefer to use only case-based information, which relates to the actor and the predicted action (Epley & Dunning, 2006; see chapter 4.1). The long-run distributional information of behavior across the population will not be taken into account. It is argued that the predictions are more accurate when they are based on both- namely the case-based and distributional information. Epley & Dunning (2006) found evidence that distributional information is used only when there is no case-based information available, e.g. when predicting the behavior of strangers.

Apart from the usage of case-based information, there is another reason for bias. This is that most people think that they are better than others are. In a group-interaction task the participants felt themselves to be on average more competent than other group members (Robins & Beer, 2001). In the study of daily behavior participants estimated themselves to laugh more often and to argue less than an average person. In another research (Kobayashi & Brown, 2003) American participants judged themselves to be more competent, friendly, modest, persistent, responsible, well-liked than most other students. Furthermore, they thought that they enjoyed their life more, as well as valued friends more than others. Participants of another study (Kanten & Teigen, 2007) rated themselves above average on desirable characteristics, like “creative”, “polite” and “intelligent” and below average on undesirable ones, like “snobbish”, “jealous” and “lazy”. Kanten & Halvor (2007) showed that people also underestimate the degree of undesirable traits that they possess. However, to attribute the self with positive traits is more likely than to neglect the negative ones. People also maintain the positive view of themselves even when they think that their peers do not see them that positively (Robins & Beer, 2001). Moreover, people tend to evaluate themselves more positive in the present than in the past and expect themselves to improve even more in the future (Kanten & Halvor, 2007). Individuals think that they already possessed more positive traits than others in the past, and that they will make faster and more important improvements than their peers in the future. While the improvement rate from past to presentfor the self and the peers is the same, the improvement rate from present to future is much higher for the self than for the peers. However, in the study of Kanten Halvor only young people (students) participated. Therefore it is problematic to generalize the results for the whole population.

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