Social threat and cognitive load magnify self-enhancement and attenuate self-deprecation

In most cases authors are permitted to post their version of the article (e.g. in Word or Tex form) to their personal website or institutional repository. Authors requiring further information regarding Elsevier's archiving and manuscript policies are encouraged to visit: • We tested competing views about the processes underlying self-serving social comparisons. • Self-esteem threat and cognitive load were manipulated while participants made social comparisons. • Threat and load increase self-favoring judgments about personality and future events. • Threat and load decrease self-deprecating judgments about future events. • Self-enhancement influences social comparison when threat or cognitive demand is high. a b s t r a c t a r t i c l e i n f o Has self-enhancement been too heavily emphasized as a motivating factor in social comparisons? Recently, researchers have argued that some types of social-comparative judgments may differ in important ways from other self-evaluative phenomena typically offered as evidence of self-enhancement motivation. In contrast to a large body of research showing that self-esteem threat affects other self-evaluative processes, the literature remains silent on how self-esteem threat affects social comparisons between self and an average peer. Furthermore, whereas social comparisons appear to be self-favoring (i.e. 'better than average') in many domains, they are predictably self-deprecating (i.e., 'worse than average') in others. As a result, recent models of social-comparative judgment posit that cognitive efficiency, rather than self-enhancement, may more typically account for the manner in which people compare themselves to peers. The current research addresses this controversy by investigating how the tension between self-enhancement and need for cognitive efficiency is resolved in social comparison. Two experiments examined the crossed effects of self-esteem threat and cognitive load on social comparisons of personality traits (Experiment 1) and likelihood of future events (Experiment 2a–b). Both self-esteem threat and cog-nitive load increased the self-favoring nature of social comparisons including those otherwise characterized by self-deprecation. The findings show that self-enhancement does significantly influence social comparison with peers and, in fact, most parsimoniously accounts for these social-comparative judgments when cognitive resources are limited. Furthermore, self-deprecating social comparisons are attenuated in the face of self-esteem threat and, therefore, do not provide a substantial challenge to the role of self-enhancement in social comparison. Introduction Have some of the prevailing assumptions about the motivations underlying social cognition missed their mark? A number of motivations are known to influence social cognition and are often used to explain …