Helloooo!! I am currently in my third year of an undergraduate degree in Psychology at the University of Southampton. I am part of the Self and Identity Task Force (a sub-project of WikiProject Psychology and will soon be improving / creating a few articles relating to Psychology, more specifically Self and Identity.
| — Wikipedian ♀ — | |
| Name | Sophi McGuinness |
|---|---|
| Born | December 1988 |
| Current location | Southampton, UK |
| Education and employment | |
| Occupation | Student |
| College | University of Southampton |
| Contact info | |
| sm24v07@soton.ac.uk | |
The article I have been working on is Illusory superiority. A plan of the article is copied below for my course tutor, Aiden Gregg, to see. Nearly all of the content listed below can be found on the Illusory superiority article.
Plan edit
More references needed
Correct grammar / sentence structure
Find new research
Change order of article
Elaborate on missing / ambiguous sections / references
Related articles / subjects edit
Self-enhancement
Self improvement
Possible papers to mention edit
Krizan & Windschitl (2009) – wishful thinking / desirability bias meta-analysis
Wegner & Fowers (2008) – parenting
Questions to answer edit
Individual differences?
More readily seen in “important” characteristics / tasks?
Why does it occur?
Order of article edit
1. Intro & definition edit
a. Early use / coining of the phrase “illusory superiority”
b. Early experimental research
2. How it may manifest itself in different situations edit
a. Performance on work / tests / intelligence
b. Social context / peers / peer evaluation (Alicke et al.)
c. Relationship happiness comparative to others
d. Health
e. Other areas (such as driving ability)
3. Why do people possess tendencies for illusory superiority? edit
a. Can it be explained by: edit
i. Social psych
ii. Evolutionary psych
b. Five primary mechanisms (Alicke et al.): edit
i. Selection
ii. Egocentrism
iii. Focalism
iv. Self vs. Aggregate
v. Heuristic
4. What factors affect the strength / likelihood of the Better-Than-Average Effect occurring? edit
a. Interpretability / ambiguity of trait
b. Method of comparison (in/direct, wording)
c. Comparison target (specific person, people in general, a statistic)
d. Controllability
e. Individual differences of judge
f. Personal “importance” of characteristics
5. Individual differences in Illusory Superiority edit
a. Cultural differences (Hamamura, Heine & Takemoto, 2007 paper)
b. Gender differences
c. Individual differences caused by another factor? (Brown, 1986 paper)
d. Experimenter effects??
6. Worse-Than-Average Effect edit
7. Illusory immunity to bias edit
8. Problems with interpretation of results edit
9. See also edit
a. Looking-glass self
b. Self-monitoring