What Biases Judgements of the Self?

According to Gilbert and Malone there are four main factors that can lead to inaccurate beliefs about others and oneself: low levels of awareness of situational forces, unrealistic expectations, inflated categorizations and incomplete corrections for perceived errors (1995, p. 8).  Low levels of awareness may be due to the invisibility of those causal influences on human behavior that are temporally and spatially distant (1995, p. 10).  Even if the causal influences are proximal, the observer must have a theory of influences on human behavior in order to interpret these influences.  Here, Gilbert and Malone’s first and second factors interact.  In their account, individuals regularly underestimate incentives, basic social pressures, and egocentric biases (1995, p. 11-12).  Egocentric biases occur when individuals do not fully understand why they perceive a certain situation in a specific way.  Unable to fully comprehend the reasons for their evaluations, individuals may either fall back on a naïve realism in which their impressions of objects are qualities of the objects themselves.  Alternatively, they may simply be unable, through introspection, to understand the origin of their own reactions and thus may actively apply a theoretical perspective that they believe to be accurate but are unable to test (1995, p. 11-12). 

Individual self-understandings tend to be highly biased.  In 1993, Sedikides demonstrated that, for his participants, self-enhancement and consistency motives were more influential than diagnosticity motives (cited in Baumeister, 2010, 149). Acknowledging situational influences could undermine both positive accomplishments and the consistency with which one believes that one can achieve these accomplishments.   

At the same time, it is not clear how these biases in self-judgment would bias judgments of other people.  Judgments of others are typically more realistic.  For example, in 1988 Taylor and Brown demonstrated that “people overestimate their successes and good traits . . . underestimate their failures and bad traits) . . . overestimate how much control they have over their lives and their fate . . . [and are] unrealistically optimistic, believing that they are more likely than other people to experience good outcomes and less likely to experience bad ones” (cited in Baumeister, 2010, p. 150).  Further, as Zuckerman demonstrated in 1979, people tend to look to situation causes to explain their own failures (cited in Baumeister, 2010, 150) but do not extend the same courtesy to others (Gilbert and Malone, 1995).  When individuals do admit to having negative traits they “persuade themselves that their good traits are unusual whereas their bad traits are widely shared” (Baumeister, 2010, 150).  

It is possible that judgments of self influence lay theories that are applied to both the self and the other.  However, Gilbert and Malone point out other cognitive reasons for unrealistic expectations-the availability bias leads to inaccurate judgments of the typicality of certain behaviors (1995, p. 13) and lay theories of situational influence can lead individuals to underestimate even their own dispositions (1995, p. 14).  Inflated categorization of behavior occurs because individuals seek to resolve ambiguity and thus see behavior as more strongly conforming to expectation than it actually does (1995, pg. 14).  Last, individuals tend to make either situational or dispositional attributions based on the motives of the moment, and correcting for these attributions can be difficult (1995, p. 15-16).