United States Military Academy at West Point Although self-enhancement is linked to psychological benefits, it is also associated with personal and interpersonal liabilities (e.g., excessive risk taking, social exclusion). Hence, structuring social situations that prompt people to keep their self-enhancing beliefs in check can confer personal and interpersonal advantages. The authors examined whether accountability can serve this purpose. Accountability was defined as the expectation to explain, justify, and defend one's self-evaluations (grades on an essay) to another person ("audience"). Experiment 1 showed that accountability curtails self-enhancement. Experiment 2 ruled out audience concreteness and status as explanations for this effect. Experiment 3 demonstrated that accountability-induced self-enhancement reduction is due to identifiability. Experiment 4 documented that identifiability decreases self-enhancement because of evaluation expectancy and an accompanying focus on one's weaknesses. Many, if not most, people regard themselves as slightly superior to others on positive dimensions that are important to them. For example, people rate themselves as above-average spouses and professionals (e.g., teachers, managers). They consider themselves more moral, trustworthy, and physically attractive than others. Perhaps because they overestimate the control they have over their lives, people believe that, compared with others, they are happier, are likely to be healthier and live longer, and are more likely to experience positive life events (e.g., a fulfilling occupation, a good marriage, winning the lottery) but less likely to experience negative life events (e.g., a road accident, chronic disease, unemployment). In fact, people exalt their important attributes even when they evaluate themselves from the perspective of their peers. Such self-superiority beliefs (i.e., self-enhancement) are well documented (Alicke, 1985; Brown, 1986; Robins & John, 1997a; Weinstein, 1980). These beliefs are maintained through several processes and strategies, such as idiosyncratic (i.e., favorable to the self) definitions of traits and skills (Dunning, Meyerowitz, & Holzberg, 1989), better memory for feedback referring to one's strengths rather than weaknesses (Sedikides & Green, 2000a), taking personal credit for success but disavowing blame for failure (K. W. Campbell & Sedikides, 1999), affirmation of a self-domain that is unrelated to the self-domain currently under threat (Steele, 1988), psychological distancing from others (Schimel, Pyszczynski, Greenberg, O'Mahen, & Arndt, 2000), withholding of information that will likely improve others (Pemberton & Sedikides, 2001), and comparison with less fortunate others (Wills, 1981). Self-enhancement is associated with short-term psychological benefits, such as a relatively high level of positive affect and self-esteem, as well as persistence in challenging tasks, effective coping with negative health outcomes, and resiliency in the face of

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Psoriasis creates interpersonal difficulties for many sufferers, but little research has examined factors that contribute to the degree of social and psychological disability that a particular person experiences. In all, 318 psoriasis patients completed measures of psychological and social well-being, the severity of their psoriasis, and their dispositional level of fear of negative evaluation (FNE). Analyses showed that disease severity and FNE significantly predicted perceptions of being stigmatized, interpersonal discomfort, stress over others' reactions, distress regarding the observable symptoms of the disease, the degree to which psoriasis interfered with the patients' lives, and patients' quality of life. Furthermore, FNE exerted a particularly strong influence for patients who had severe cases of psoriasis.

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Two experiments demonstrated that fast (vs. normal-paced) end-of-advertisement disclaimers undermine consumers' purchase intention toward untrusted brands (both trust-unknown and not-trusted brands), but that disclaimer speed has no effect on consumers' purchase intention toward trusted brands. The differential effects of disclaimer speed for untrusted versus trusted brands were not due to differences in consumers' familiarity with the brands (experiment 1). Consistent with the hypothesis that fast disclaimers adversely affect purchase intention via heuristic rather than elaborative processes, the disclaimer speed # brand trust interaction effect remained robust even when the disclaimer presented positive information about the advertised product (experiment 2).