We should feel good about ourselves. In general, we
are encouraged to do this from an early age and most of us are familiar with
the comment that “if we don’t, who will?” So parents and teachers shower
encouragement on us like confetti as we develop. In the business world, the
trend continues with managers being taught to praise willy-nilly. Boot camp in
the army won’t fit into this picture and all kids aren’t quite as fortunate,
but the “folk theory” as Kim and Chiu describe it, prevails (1).
The danger of this continuous re-enforcement of our
great, but imaginary, abilities is that we will believe it and we will have a
severely self-enhanced view of our capability and potential. In extreme cases,
enough to stand for election. The corollary applies in the boot camps around
the country where some of the participants in the game can be harboring
significant self-effacement ideas.
As Kim and Chui point out, the literature is
unclear if marked self-enhancement is all that it’s cracked up to be and they
set out measure the effects with better controls than had previously been in
place so that their subsequent analysis should be more meaningful (1).
They started experimenting with a group of 95 US
undergrads and then, in a show of confidence, expanded it to a group of 2780
High-School students in grades 7 through 12 in Hong Kong, before tidying up
with another group of 160 US undergrads. Clearly a robust study, where they
misled participants as to their test scores in order to test how robust was their
self-esteem or lack of it.
With the computers humming and dissipating many
kilowatts, they showed that the depression levels were minimized in those
individuals whose self-assessment was most accurate. An overblown view of ones
abilities, and hence ones expectations of performance and grade position, only
led to tears and a gnashing of teeth in the wilderness. Unjustified
self-effacement had a similar effect.
The conclusion? Don’t kid yourself.
- Y-H Kim and C-Y Chui, Emotion, 11, 1096, (2011).
I recall, in my youth, my father calling me his princess, clearly a term of endearment. But I wondered for many years how I got my royal genealogy. At some point I had to concede that I wasn't related to the Queen, alas! Somehow I have managed to cope.