David A. Kenny
April 2, 2021




List of Topics

This page consists of a range of topics related to self-perception. Click on a topic to view it.

Self-Enhancement and Effacement: Do people see themselves as better or worse that others?

Self-Accuracy vs. Other Accuracy: Who knows you better, yourself or others?

Self-Consistency: What is the consistency of self perception across traits, time, and interaction partners?

Self and the PERSON Model: How does the PERSON Model treat self-perceptions?


   
Chapter 7 of
Interpersonal Perception: The Foundation of Social Relationships pages 186-193.

The degree to which a people rate themselves higher than they rates others. To measure individual differences in self enhancement or self-effacement, the person's perceiver and target effect should be removed.

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With western samples, we usually find self-enhancement: People see themselves as better than others. The one exception is Big Five factor of emotional stability: People see others as more emotionally stable.

Taylor and Brown have hypothesized that self-enhancement leads to better mental health outcomes. With Virginia Kwan and Michael Bond, I am exploring this issue. We are proposing that perceiver and target effects must be controlled in measuring self-enhancement.



   

Chapter 7 of Interpersonal Perception: The Foundation of Social Relationships pages 186-193.

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Given that self and other agree, but not perfectly which is more accurate?  Several  studies suggest that others are more accurate (see Chapter 9 of Kenny, 1994).  Likely, this result is context sensitive. That is, self should be more accurate at evaluating more internal traits whereas others might be more accurate at evaluating more behavioral traits. Also, self may be more accurate at predicting future or past behavior whereas others may be more accurate at reporting behaviors that are observed. There is some indication that self is more accurate for judgments of Big Five factor of culture.


 
Chapter 7 of
Interpersonal Perception: The Foundation of Social Relationships . For Self-Enhancement, see pages 186-193, for Self-Validity, see pages 194-196, for Self-Consistency, see page 194, Self Changing with Interaction Partners, see pages x

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Based an work by Micha Strack, we can expand the concept of self-other agreement.  The self is measured for each interaction partner.  So Alice rates herself when she is with Betty, Carol, and Dawn.  There are three forms of self-other agreement: perceiver, generalized, and dyadic.

  • Perceiver self-other agreement refers to the correlation between how a person generally sees others and how others generally see themselves when they interact with the person.
  • Generalized self-other agreement refers to the correlation between the how the person generally sees self with others and how others generally see the person.
  • Dyadic self-other agreement refers to a correlation between how a person sees him or herself with a particular other and how that particular other sees the person.
To date, no one has published an investigation of this type of agreement.

 

   
Chapter 7 of
Interpersonal Perception: The Foundation of Social Relationships pages 186-193.



When the perceiver and target are the same person, presumably the number of acts, or n, is very large. People have observed thousands of their own acts. With n so very large, the self-impression would be the sum of P and O, and the other four components would essentially vanish. Thus self-perception within the Person Model is P + O.

What, then, is the meaning of P and O in self-perception? The definition of P is that it is the average of all the scale values of all possible acts for a given target across all possible perceivers. Note that this definition gives no special status to the self as a perceiver, nor does it allow for the fact that some “behaviors” might be accessible only to the self. Those behaviors are not included in P. Moreover, on the Consensus page 4, it was argued that P varied by context, and so different perceiver groups, for example, friends, family, and coworkers, have a different P. Presumably, the P in self-perception is the cross-context P, that is, the P averaged over all perceiving contexts, which was denoted as Pg. Given these arguments, the correlation between the P or Personality components for self- and other-perceptions is then not 1, but rather .89.

What is the meaning of O for self-perception? Because behaviors to which only the self has access are not represented in P, some of O contains the special access that the self has. Thus part of O contains a potentially valid piece. However, it is also well established that self-perceptions are subject to several biases that the perception of others is not. Thus it seems reasonable to expect that there is more O variance for self-perceptions than for the impressions of others. The suggestion on page 199 of the 2020 Interpersonal Perception book is to set the O variance for self to 2.2 (a value greater than the 1.5 value for the impressions of others).

The conclusion that self–other agreement increases as a function of acquaintance is consistent with the forecasts of the PERSON model, showing that accuracy increases with acquaintance because, in many studies of accuracy, self-ratings are often used as a measure of the truth. If consensus increases only slightly with acquaintance, but self–other agreement increases, then the expectation would be for more consensus than self–other agreement when others are not well acquainted with the target, but a narrowing gap when they are well acquainted. The evidence from the two 1993 John and Robins studies would seem to support this conclusion because the gap between self–other agreement and consensus was much smaller when the participants had known the targets on average for 18 years than it was when participants were only moderately familiar.


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Kwan



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