Abstract

Humans self-enhance. That is, humans are motivated to evaluate themselves positively. Self-enhancement is a powerful process that builds the basis for many classical self-theories (e.g., dissonance theory, social-identity theory). This symposium aims to show that self-enhancement is also a powerful process driving diverse social phenomena going beyond the immediate self-concept. Specifically, Leising shows how two independent self-enhancer traits—leadership potential and self-regard—drive positive illusions of intelligence. Schröder-Abé shows that speed-daters, who self-enhance regarding their attractiveness, are chosen particularly frequently as short-term partners. Dufner shows that narcissism (the self-enhancer trait) is also linked to more mate appeal because of lowered inhibition among narcissists. Kopietz shows that while we are good at remembering positive self-related feedback we tend to neglect negative feedback and discusses potential mechanisms. Gebauer revisits whether self-enhancement is prevalent in collectivist cultures and shows that highhanded self-reports of prosociality among collectivists is mediated by communal self-enhancement. Together, the five talks showcase that self-enhancement is a powerful process driving divergent believes and behaviors, such as positive intelligence illusions, mate appeal, memory bias, and self-reported prosociality.

The typical finding (e.g., Dovidio & Gaertner, 2002) is that both White and Black job applicants will get hired if highly qualified or not get hired if weakly qualified. If anything, Blacks get hired slightly more often in both cases. However, if qualifications are ambiguous Whites will get hired much more often than Blacks (because it’s easy to justify not hiring the Black guy due to his ambiguous qualifications).

The field study by Leo Kaas and Christian Manger (2010) actually replicated these basic findings outside of the lab. They faked applications for internships at real companies and named their applicants either German or Turkish. Needless to say, Turks got invited much less often than Germans for the same position and with basically the same (high) qualifications.

The problem is, that these authors actually used highly qualified people, which on the one hand decreased the effect considerably—i.e., the bias toward the German was only around 15%—but on the other hand one could say that there is much less awareness or egalitarian values in Germany’s society. One would have expected no real difference between highly qualified Turkish vs. German applicants based on the US American lab study findings. Furthermore, the authors argue, that the pro-German bias should be considerably higher with less qualified applicants. On the other hand, providing letters of reference diminished the effect; that is, if Turkish applicants received positive, personal letters about their personal characteristics their chances to an interview were equal to the German applicants.

So, where does this leave us? One conclusion (or consequence) might be that highly qualified, well-integrated immigrants will actually leave Germany and seek jobs in their parent’s home countries. So, these hiring policies and subtle (?!) forms of discrimination will lead to a special kind of brain drain. That’s just great…

References:

• Dovidio, J. F., & Gaertner, S. L. (2002).  Aversive racism and selection decisions: 1989 and 1999. Psychological Science, 11, 319-323.
• Kaas, L., & Manger, C. (2010). Ethnic Discrimination in Germany’s Labour Market: A Field Experiment. Discussion Paper No. 4741. Retrieved from IZA’s website on May 29th, 2010.

By accident I stumbled upon a HTML/JavaScript template by Marianne Promberger, which allows relatively easy, independent programming of one’s experiments. All one needs is a server:) I’ll look into it in the near future and report my experiences here.

I am planning on infrequently blog about psychology-related interesting stuff, but don’t know yet if I’ll have the necessary time. If you are interested in psychology but don’t have access to psychological journals, or hate reading them, you might want to try out The Inquisitive Mind—a free online magazine that publishes interesting psychological articles for a lay audience.

For everyone who speaks or reads German, a German version has been launched this week and I am encouraging you to check it out and spread the word. If you prefer Portuguese, go for it:)

So much for now!

Best
Rene