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People process information about themselves, other people, and the world through the filter of their own self-images and egoistic desires. Their experience of the events that unfold around them is accompanied by an ongoing internal commentary that modifies the nature of the experience itself. Furthermore, what they say to themselves is often biased as people engage in self-deluded wishful thinking and judge events through the narrow window of their own self-interest. The self appears to be inherently egocentric and egotistical, and these tendencies create a number of problems. This chapter deals with the ways in which self-reflection interferes with people's perceptions of reality, and with the personal and interpersonal costs of these egotistic distortions, including self-serving illusions, the better-than-average effect, self-serving attributions, the bias blind spot, and other consequences of self-enhancement. The chapter concludes with tactics for fostering the recognition that one's perceptions are likely to be distorted in self-serving ways.

Even rose-colored glasses cannot hide the apparent discrepancy between models of self-control and the adaptive view of positive illusions. Most models of self-control suggest that accurate perceptions of the relation between behavior and goals are fundamental for goal attainment. However, the adaptive view of positive illusions suggests that individuals with unrealistically positive self-perceptions are more successful at achieving goals such as satisfying personal relationships, well-being, and professional accomplishment. If people fool themselves into thinking that their behavior is consistent with their goals (e.g., “Sleeping through class will help me get a good grade because I will be well-rested on the day of the exam”) or fail to acknowledge conflict between goals (e.g., “Eating peanut butter cups is delicious and healthy because peanut butter has protein”), then how can they execute the self-control needed to adjust behavior or resolve goal conflicts? This chapter integrates these perspectives by examining the evidence for the adaptive view of positive illusions and mechanisms that underlie unrealistically positive self-perceptions. The extant research suggests that positive illusions may be advantageous for goal attainment in the short-term, particularly mood regulation, but do not promote successful self-control across time. The failure of positive illusions to promote successful self-control in a sustained manner may be explained by the shallow information processing that supports many unrealistically positive self-views. In other words, positive illusions may often reflect cognitive shortcuts that need to be corrected to serve the monitoring function described in models of self-control. The adaptive benefit of positive illusions for mood regulation suggests that this relation occurs in situations in which mood regulation is a priority or it is not too costly to sacrifice other goals at its expense.

This chapter begins with an overview of the encoding, storage, and retrieval of memories. Important to the encoding process are attention, focus, understanding, and the agility of the working memory. The role of emotion in memory storage is reviewed, with examples of how heightened emotion can enhance memory, or may interfere with it, if the emotion is too strong. Factors that bias our recall (such as cultural and other experiential elements, as well as the tendency toward self-enhancement), along with other characteristics (e.g., age, gender, lack of sleep) that are sometimes thought to be related to memory, are reviewed. Strategies for enhancing memory, including tailoring the information to the patient’s characteristics, considering health literacy, avoiding jargon and information overload, mnemonics and chunking, and multimedia memory aids, are given.

In this chapter, the authors note that social and personality psychologists address the issue of behavior in rather different ways. Social psychologists tend to exploit behavior as a concrete outcome reflecting the difference in psychological state induced by an experimental manipulation. In contrast, personality psychologists view behavior as only one indicator of psychological constructs. The authors note that the traditional complaint against self-report measures is their vulnerability to self-presentation effects. The general tendency for people to self-enhance raises concerns that self-reports are just as likely to reflect presentation motives as actual personalities. One solution is to index self-enhancement via behavioral measures. The authors compare the full range of options from self-report to concrete behavioral methods. They also discuss the over-claiming approach, which taps the tendency to claim knowledge of non-existent items. They conclude with the response-latency approach, which is purely behavioral in nature.

This chapter continues to examine the cultural origins of the autobiographical self as revealed in everyday memories. It argues that working self-goals monitor the processing of personal event information and ensure privileged encoding of and access to confirmatory memories in concert with the needs, motives, and goals prioritized by the culture. Drawing upon empirical research of cultural and cognitive psychology, the chapter shows that memory biases such as egocentricity, beneffectance, and conservatism are specific to the Western cultural contexts that prioritize autonomy and self-enhancement goals, and such biases may not apply to other cultural contexts that prize relatedness and self-improvement goals.

It is argued that false belief is often better for a person than true belief, by appeal to the psychological literature on “self-enhancement bias” – bias in favor of a positive self-conception. Such bias was described by Hume, who called it pride or “greatness of mind.” Empirical research on self-enhancement bias – overly positive self-evaluation, unrealistic optimism, and illusion of control – is reviewed. It is argued that such bias is often valuable vis-à-vis the wellbeing of the believer, and objections to this conclusion are presented and discussed.

This chapter provides a history of social comparison theory starting in 1944 with the “Level of Aspiration” paper by Kurt Lewin and colleagues. From the work of Stan Schachter on affiliation in the 1950s, the chapter maintains a linear narrative, attempting to tell the story with numerous digressions into what and how particularly important events happened. The authors are uniquely suited to do this, as their professional lives and friendships have overlapped almost completely with the developments of social comparison theory. They then discuss several theories that are often confused as being based on social comparison theory but are not. They yield the razor with gusto! The chapter ends with a discussion of the neighboring fields and applications that are indeed on the reasons this book is being published.

This chapter describes how integrating attribution processes with social comparison theory resolves some long-standing ambiguities about the role of similarity and motives in Festinger’s original theory. The Goethals and Darley attributional reformulation, which clarified some of these ambiguities, is first described, along with a brief survey of empirical evidence. Then, the proxy model of ability comparison and the triadic model of opinion comparison, which expand on the attributional reformulation, are reviewed. A major focus of proxy and the triadic theories is identifying the specific questions social comparisons can answer: “Can I do X?”, “Am I correct about X?”, “Do I like or agree with X?”, and “Will I like X?” A central theme is that the tendency to compare to those who perform better or ahead of us (i.e., tried “X” before we did) is adaptive. This approach leads us to the conclusion that motives for self-knowledge and for self-enhancement, which have long been considered to be opposing motives, are intertwined.

Drawing on empirical research from psychology, this chapter gives an account of moral grandstanding. Grandstanding is a contribution to public moral discourse that is significantly motivated by the desire that others think one is morally respectable. This chapter then answers several important questions about moral grandstanding. Must grandstanders think they are morally great? Do grandstanders always know that they are trying to impress others? Can grandstanders speak the truth? Does grandstanding work? Is grandstanding just a left-wing problem? And are the authors themselves grandstanding? The chapter concludes by explaining the differences between moral grandstanding and virtue signaling.

This chapter presents several ways that moral grandstanding can involve a failure to show appropriate respect for persons. Grandstanders often use the putative moral failings of others as opportunities to showcase their own moral qualities. This phenomenon is common in cases of viral outrage and online shaming. Grandstanders also deceive other people by encouraging inaccurate impressions of their own moral credentials, thus gaining trust they do not deserve, and sometimes greater leeway to behave immorally. Grandstanding is also presented as a form of free-riding. If everyone engaged in grandstanding all the time, it would not impress anyone, and moral talk would not work. Grandstanders get the best of both worlds, while others restrain themselves to avoid abusing moral talk.

Of all the objects you know and have beliefs about, you are the object you pay most attention to and want to know best. And, when it comes to sharing beliefs and opinions about the world with others, you are the object in the world that you most want your significant others to share your beliefs and opinions about who you are. How do individuals learn to know who they are? It begins with children learning what it is about themselves and what they do that determines how others respond to them as an object in the world (shared social contingent self). They share with others what is relevant about them, what matters. They share what to expect of themselves in terms of their skills and abilities (shared expectant self). They share with others what goals they should pursue and what standards they should use to evaluate themselves (shared monitored self). Depending on whether their shared goals and standards are promotion or prevention, people inflate or deflate their self-esteem to maintain their eagerness or vigilance, respectively. And they are motivated to verify the truth of shared beliefs about themselves for both positive and negative self-attributes. And a big part of our sense of self are the social identities that we embrace. Individuals create a shared reality we with groups that is so powerful that they will die for it. Like a “band of brothers,” there can be a social fusion with a political group that has the power of family.

The impact of culture on the self, the most fundamental unit of psychological inquiry, has captivated scholarly interest for decades. In this chapter, the authors review strands from this prolific body of cross-cultural research, sampled along several lines. They plot a rough trajectory from the early discussions of cultural forms of self-construal to emergent research in online presentation and consumer selfhood. They then illustrate culture’s profound effects on the cognitive, affective, and behavioral facets of the self by reviewing cultural variations in individuals’ self-concept, self-regard, and self-presentation. This cultural divergence notwithstanding, they argue for the universality of basic self-processes. Specifically, the authors claim that the need for positive self-regard and the motivation for self-enhancement exist in all cultural contexts, even as their cultural manifestations radically differ. The chapter concludes with an exploration of self-psychology in the current globalizing age, where cultures around the world are reformatted as consumer cultures.

This chapter discusses law’s capacity to fulfil its conduct-guiding function within different frameworks of practical reasoning. A functional argument of Raz is initially presented: according to this argument, authorities—including legal authorities—would not be able to fulfil their intended function if their directives operated as reasons for action that compete with opposing reasons in terms of their weight, rather than as pre-emptive reasons (Section 6.1). Several grounds for this argument are considered and found to be inadequate (Section 6.2). The spotlight is then directed onto another relevant consideration: law’s structural suitability to counteract several situational biases operative in contexts of individual and collective action (Sections 6.3.1–6.3.5). It is argued that law’s pivotal role in addressing practical problems linked with those biases strongly militate against the weighing model (Sections 6.3.6). Finally, the implications of those biases for the pre-emption thesis are discussed (Sections 6.3.7).

This chapter reviews a study employing electroencephalography (EEG) in a neurosociological investigation of the perceptual control of identities with a focus on the verification/enhancement question. In this within‐subjects experiment focused on the college student identity, researchers recorded scalp EEG and presented participants with both verifying feedback and nonverifying feedback, then adjudicated between the verification and enhancement motives. They examined the link between self-relevant feedback and emotional reactions. Overall, the EEG results were more consistent with self-enhancement theories, while the emotions results were mixed. Emotional responses for participants with more favorable identity meanings indicated self-enhancement, while emotional responses for participants with unfavorable identity meanings indicated self-verification, which may reflect a form of “depressive realism.” The chapter discusses the implications of these results for the future of identity theory and related lines of work.

Optimistically biased beliefs are beliefs about oneself that are more positive than is warranted by the evidence. Optimistically biased beliefs are the result of the influence of cognitive and motivational factors on people’s capacity to acquire, retrieve, and use information about themselves, and they resist counterevidence due to biases in belief updating. From a psychological point of view, optimistically biased beliefs contribute positively to subjective wellbeing, mental health, resilience, motivation, caring behaviour, and productivity. This chapter argues that optimistically biased beliefs also have significant epistemic benefits that could not be easily attained otherwise. In particular, they enhance socialization, leading to both exchanging information with one’s peers and receiving feedback from them, and they support one’s sense of self as that of a competent, largely coherent, and effective agent, helping sustain one’s motivation in the pursuit of one’s goals.

This chapter critically examines psychological conceptualizations of humility and offers a novel integrative perspective that identifies the central psychological feature of humility. The gist of this approach is that, at its core, humility involves the recognition that, however great one’s personal accomplishments or positive characteristics may be, one is not fundamentally a more special person because of them and, thus, should not be viewed or treated as special outside the domain of one’s accomplishments or characteristics (and sometimes even within it). Our review of the literature demonstrates that research findings are largely consistent with the notion that the features of both state and trait humility are either antecedents of the recognition that one’s accomplishments and positive characteristics do not entitle one to be treated as a special person or are psychological or behavioral manifestations of that recognition.