Normative clearsightedness: a general knowledge of social valuation

Abstract

The goal of this research was to develop the work of Py and Somat (1991) concerning normative clearsightedness. Although they were interested in the norm of internality, they de®ned normative clearsightedness as`the knowledge of the normative or counternormative aspect of certain types of behaviour or certain types of judgements'. However, even though they placed the concept`normative clearsightedness' within a broad normative perspective that goes beyond merely the norm of internality, it remains to be explored what this broad perspective consists of. In this study, we have turned towards the notion of individualism which testi®es, just like the norm of internality, to a certain social desirability (Somat, Doisneau & Gouin, 1994, unpublished manuscript) in testing the generalizability of normative clearsightedness to other norms. The results obtained in this study demonstrate that normative clearsightedness is applicable to at least one norm other than the norm of internality. In fact, the normative clearsightedness of internal explanations seems to be associated with the normativity of individualistic beliefs. In other words, we ®nd that subjects who are clearsighted with regard to internality are also clearsighted with regard to individualism.

A methodological shortnote on measuring and assessing the effects of normative clearsightedness about internality

“…If, as Somat and Vazel (1999) suggested, normative clearsightedness about internality is the expression of a social skill, our results point to another way of expressing that skill, one that enables subjects to have a favorable impact on how they are judged. Normative clearsightedness would not be the expression of a difference between two supposedly symmetrically opposed situations, but the ability to present oneself as internal in situations where it is important to look good (pro-normative situations).…”

“…We pointed out potential problems in the traditional CI method of calculating this type of normative clearsightedness (see Channouf, Py, & Somat, 1995;Jouffre, Py, & Somat, 2001;Py & Ginet, 2003;Somat & Vazel, 1999). The alternative approach we propose provides some good answers to the various problems posed.…”

“…With empirical data as our support, we propose another way of measuring normative clearsightedness and of estimating its effects on judgments of others. This will lead us to discuss some of the postulates underlying the concept of clearsightedness as initially defined and described by Py and Somat (1991) and recently developed by Somat and Vazel (1999) and Py and Ginet (2003).…”

“…Pursuing this idea, Somat and Vazel (1999) suggested that normative clearsightedness is a kind of general knowledge of the social value granted to certain explanations, and that this knowledge extends beyond the norm of internality to include other norms. They argued that normative clearsightedness can therefore be seen as a social skill that allows people to favorably influence how other people judge them: "Given this idea, we assume that the clearsightedness about internality, which translates the knowledge of the social valorization of internal explanations, influences judgments related to other social objects to which a value is attached.…”

Social utility, social desirability and scholastic judgments: Toward a personological model of academic evaluation

“…These measures concerned the two achievement test scores (r=.75), the two class averages (r=.92), and the two teacher judgment scores (r=.80). Then each pupil's normative clearsightedness score was obtained by taking the difference between the number of internal explanations chosen by the pupil under pro-normative instructions, and the number of internal explanations chosen under counter-normative instructions (Py & Somat, 1991;Somat & Vazel, 1999). Finally, the pupils' social-utility and social-desirability scores were obtained from a factor analysis (principal axis method, oblimin rotation) on the teachers' personological descriptions.…”