Self-Superiority Beliefs: The Debate Between Self-Enhancement and Cognitive Egocentrism Revisited Seminar

When judging themselves as compared to others, people report that they are in many respects superior. Motivational and cognitive explanations for self-superiority beliefs have been proposed, with cognitive explanations currently being dominant.

The most prominent motivational explanation states that self-superiority beliefs serve a self-enhancement motive in that they serve to enhance one's feelings of self-worth. The most prominent cognitive explanation, the cognitive egocentrism hypothesis, states that self-superiority biases derive from the differential accessibility of or differential focus on self-versus other related information.

I present correlational and experimental evidence from a set of studies that were designed to pit cognitive egocentrism and self-enhancement against each other. Whereas the pattern of correlations between relative self-judgments, absolute self- and other-judgments, and self-esteem scores was consistent with both explanations, experimentally induced self-threat affected self-superiority beliefs following the pattern predicted by the self-enhancement hypothesis only. The self-enhancement motive does drive self-superiority biases.