Quantifying the Association of Self-Enhancement Bias With Self-Ratings of Personality and Life Satisfaction

Abstract

Kwan, John, Kenny, Bond, and Robins conceptualize self-enhancement as a favorable comparison of self-judgments with judgments of and by others. Applying a modified version of Kwan et al.'s approach to behavior observation data, we show that the resulting measure of self-enhancement bias is highly reliable, predicts self-ratings of intelligence as well as does actual intelligence, interacts with item desirability in predicting responses to questionnaire items, and also predicts general life satisfaction. Consistent with previous research, however, self-ratings of intelligence did not become more valid when controlling for self-enhancement bias. We also show that common personality scales like the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale reflect self-enhancement at least as strongly as do scales that were designed particularly for that purpose (i.e., "social desirability scales"). The relevance of these findings in regard to the validity and utility of social desirability scales is discussed.

Self-enhancement: Conceptualization and Assessment

“…If a residual score R S is correlated with simple S judgments, so it is correlated with S after correction for two, or more, other variables. Indeed, in their Table 2, Leising et al (2016) report this extreme dependency (r = .92), raising the question once again of how much has been gained by controlling for multiple variables. Our own data show that over a total of 1,779 cases, simple self-judgments, S, were correlated with the residuals after removing variance shared with judgments of others, O, and test scores, T, at r = .619, which was slightly lower than the correlation between S and the residuals obtained from controlling only T (r = .689).…”

“…Residualizing self-judgments reifies the concept of positive (and negative) bias as a trait (Krueger et al, 2013). Reflecting this line of thought, Leising et al (2016) propose that the residuals' "main advantage" is that they will "by definition, be independent of the [predictors, and that they] may thus be independently interpreted" (p. 593). In other words, there is an inferential leap from noting the independence of residuals from one predictor to assuming its independent nature from another.…”

“…This correlation cannot be negative because there are no negative variances. In contrast, bivariate regression guarantees that the correlation between the residuals and the reality variable, T, is zero (Asendorpf & Ostendorf, 1998;Leising et al, 2016). The association between the residuals and a third variable is given by the semi-partial correlation: the relationship between selfjudgment and happiness controlling for true scores.…”

“…In other words, it cannot be said that happiness is predicted by the positivity of the self-image, S, the person's true score, T, and the discrepancy between S and T. The latter term is redundant, and as we argue, problematic when reified. There is, however, the possibility that the statistical interaction between S and T or polynomial transforms of each might explain additional variance (Barranti, Carlson, & Côté, 2017), but the relevance of these predictors for the theoretical construct of self-enhancement remains open to debate (Edwards, 1994;Krueger & Wright, 2011;Leising, Locke, Kurzius, & Zimmermann, 2016;Zuckerman & Knee, 1995). 1 Other concerns are that discrepancy scores lack reliability when true variability is low (Lord, 1958;Rogosa & Willett, 1983) and that they fall on arbitrary metrics that obscure "where a given score locates an individual on the underlying psychological dimension" (Blanton & Jaccard, 2006, p. 27).…”

“…This dual-difference score does not capture the interaction between S, O, and T to predict H, but instead reflects summed differences, which obscure underlying patterns. One person may be identified as a self-enhancer because S > O and S = T, while another person is identified as a self-enhancer because S = O and S > T. Leising et al (2016) used multiple regression to account for social comparison and social reality. They regressed S on both T and O and retained the residualized S as the measure of self-enhancement.…”