Effects of Standards on Self-Enhancing Interpretations of Ambiguous Social Comparison Information

When people receive feedback about how they and others have performed on a task-feedback that should be interpreted as implying equivalent performance-they only seem to exhibit a self-enhancement bias (erroneously believing they have outperformed others) when feedback about others' performance is unambiguous and feedback about their own performance is ambiguous (Klein, 2001). They do so by distorting estimates of their own performance upward. In 2 studies, we show how 2 types of standards moderate this effect. In Experiment 1, we show that people distort ambiguous self-performance feedback in a self-enhancing direction only when they receive information about their own and others'performance at the same time. In Experiment 2, we found that when people hold neutral prior beliefs about their ability (an internal standard), they exhibit self-enhancement in their performance assessments whenever at least one source of information (self or other) is ambiguous. Despite the wealth of literature that has demonstrated self-enhancement biases, it appears that the emergence of this bias is bounded in theoretically interesting ways when people are faced with performance feedback.