Affiliations: | | Department of Psychology | Ohio University, Athens, OH, United States |
Area:
Social Psychology, General Religion
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High-probability grants
According to our matching algorithm, Mark D. Alicke is the likely recipient of the following grants.
Years |
Recipients |
Code |
Title / Keywords |
Matching score |
1998 — 2001 |
Alicke, Mark |
N/AActivity Code Description: No activity code was retrieved: click on the grant title for more information |
Maintaining Self-Esteem in Upward Social Comparison
Research on social comparison has shown that it is very common for people to compare their own performance and ability with that of others. In many situations, people engage in a spontaneous comparison with others. In other cases, the comparisons are made by others, such as when siblings are compared by their parents, students by their teachers, and employees by their employers. The sheer number of social comparison opportunities that spontaneously arise ensures that people will sometimes compare unfavorably. Comparisons with superior performers are potentially threatening to self-esteem, especially when the outperformance is clear and unambiguous. When defensive explanations are difficult to maintain, people have recourse to an explanation that can protect their self-esteem: exaggerating the outperformer's ability. This is an effective attributional strategy because it is believable and it allows the inferior performer to appear unselfish. This phenomenon is referred to as the `genius effect.` By viewing the outperformer as unusually talented, inferior performers can benefit from the outperformer's knowledge without suffering undue damage to their own perceived competence. If the genius effect is a pervasive social comparison strategy, it suggests a greater, and more salutary, role for upward comparisons than has previously been recognized in social comparison theory. Indeed, it seems more adaptive to exaggerate the ability of superior performers than to derogate or avoid them. Furthermore, unrealistically favorable evaluations may be more beneficial to social relationships than derogatory ones. The genius effect also helps explain how people are able to maintain unrealistically positive self-images. The social psychology literature indicates that people evaluate themselves more favorably than an average peer on most dimensions. Relatively little research has been directed, however, at discovering how people maintain these self-images in the face of contradictory social comparisons. The genius effect suggests what may be a pervasive strategy for maintaining an unrealistically favorable self-image following upward comparisons: exaggerate the talents and attributes of people who fare better on the comparison dimension.
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