Self-Enhancement自我提升

Overview 概述

It’s not an accident that, every time we list the self-motives in this section, we list self-enhancement first. This motive, the desire to have a positive view of the self, is one of people’s most important and most doggedly pursued goals, at least in Western cultures. This motivation guides people to seek out positive information about the self as well as to attempt to avoid, ignore, or counterargue negative information about the self (Taylor & Brown, 1988; Taylor & Sherman, 2008). This motive can be made especially strong by receiving negative information about the self.
它并非巧合，每次我们在这部分列出自我动机时，总是将自我提升放在首位。这种动机，即拥有积极自我看法的欲望，是人们最重要的、最坚持不懈追求的目标之一，至少在西方文化中是这样。这种动机引导人们寻求关于自我的积极信息，并试图避免、忽视或反驳关于自我的负面信息（Taylor & Brown，1988；Taylor & Sherman，2008）。当人们收到关于自我的负面信息时，这种动机可以变得特别强烈。

As an example of what this self-enhancement motive can lead to, imagine a person who is about to send a text message to someone they have a crush on. They’re nervous about sending the text, so they decide to show it to a friend first. What type of friend are they going to show it to? It might make sense for them to show it to the friend who is most likely to give them accurate feedback. However, many people have a tendency to seek positive feedback in situations that may make them feel bad about themselves, and would likely seek out a friend who would tell them their text is good, rather than give them suggestions on how to improve.
作为一个例子，说明这种自我提升动机可能导致的后果，想象一下一个人即将给心仪的人发送短信。他们担心发送这条短信，所以决定先给朋友看。他们打算给哪位朋友看？他们可能会选择给最有可能给出准确反馈的朋友看。然而，许多人倾向于在可能让他们感到不好的情况下寻求积极的反馈，可能会选择一个会告诉他们的短信很好，而不是给出改进建议的朋友。

The Three Positive Illusions 三个正面错觉

As you might expect, this bias toward viewing oneself in a positive light has the consequence of making people feel good about themselves and bolstering their self-esteem (Jones et al., 1981). However, if we’re swimming in a sea of almost exclusively positive information about ourselves, will we have distorted views of the self and the world? The answer to this question is clearly “yes.” Taylor and Brown (1988, 1994) listed three positive illusions that people have about themselves: People tend to (a) believe they are better than they really are, (b) expect more positive outcomes for themselves than is rational, and (c) overestimate the amount of control that they have over their outcomes. As might be expected, these positive illusions can lead us to inaccurate impressions of the self and the outcomes we should expect. For example, research has shown that over 93% of the United States population believes they are an above-average driver (Svenson, 1981), and people who are incarcerated tend to believe that they are more kind, compassionate, and moral than members of the general population (Sedikides et al., 2014). Both beliefs are likely the result of overzealous self-enhancement.
正如您可能预料的那样，这种倾向于以积极的方式看待自己的偏见，其后果是让人们对自己感到满意，并增强他们的自尊心（琼斯等人，1981 年）。然而，如果我们沉浸在几乎完全关于自己的积极信息的大海中，我们是否会对自己和世界的看法产生扭曲？对这个问题的答案是显然的：“是的。”泰勒和布朗（1988 年，1994 年）列举了人们对自己存在的三种积极错觉：（a）认为自己比实际情况更好，（b）对自己期望比理性更多的积极结果，以及（c）高估自己对结果的掌控程度。正如预期的那样，这些积极错觉可能导致我们对自我和应期望的结果产生不准确的认识。例如，研究表明，超过 93%的美国人口认为自己是高于平均水平的驾驶员（斯文森，1981 年），而服刑人员倾向于认为自己比普通民众更善良、更有同情心、更有道德（塞迪基德斯等人，2014 年）。这两种信念很可能是过度自我提升的结果。

Although it might seem like having these positive illusions could lead people into a lifetime of disappointment when the illusions are proven false, in general, these overly positive self-beliefs seem to be adaptive, leading people to persist longer in the face of failure, be more resilient in the face of negative feedback, and care more about others than they would without these illusions (Taylor & Brown, 1988). In fact, the people least likely to display these cognitive biases (and, as a result, have more accurate self-perceptions) are people with depression. In short, when it comes to self-evaluation, it seems that having a slightly inflated view of the self can be more adaptive than a strictly accurate view.
尽管这些积极的错觉可能看似在错觉被证明是虚假时会导致人们陷入一生的失望，但总的来说，这些过于积极的自我信念似乎具有适应性，使人们在面对失败时能坚持更久，在面对负面反馈时更具韧性，并且比没有这些错觉时更关心他人（Taylor & Brown，1988）。事实上，最不可能表现出这些认知偏差（因此，自我感知更准确）的是抑郁症患者。简而言之，当涉及到自我评价时，似乎拥有稍微膨胀的自我观念比严格准确的观点更具适应性。

Before concluding this section, let’s loop back and consider the caveat mentioned in the first paragraph: “at least in Western cultures.” Heine and Hamamura (1997) conducted a review of the research literature that has looked at self-enhancement and the illusions it generates, both in Eastern cultures (including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Singaporean) and Western cultures. They found that, on average across these studies, East Asians showed a greatly reduced tendency to self-enhance compared to people from the West. In fact, in many cases, East Asians showed no self-enhancement at all or a complete absence of self-enhancement. And, as you might expect, Asian Americans showed more self-enhancement than East Asians living in Asia, but less self-enhancement than Americans with no Asian heritage. Combining these results with what we know about positive illusions, many researchers have concluded that East Asians do not show the positive illusions described earlier. Others suggest that this perspective is an oversimplification of a more complex idea that sees East Asians as self-enhancing less than people from the West, but more than zero (see Heine, 2003). 
在结束本节之前，让我们回顾一下第一段中提到的注意事项：“至少在西方文化中。” Heine 和 Hamamura（1997）回顾了关于自我提升及其产生的错觉的研究文献，这些研究涉及东亚文化（包括中国、日本、韩国、越南和新加坡）和西方文化。他们发现，在这些研究平均来看，东亚人自我提升的倾向远低于西方人。事实上，在许多情况下，东亚人几乎没有自我提升或完全没有自我提升。而且，正如你所预期的，亚裔美国人比亚洲的东亚人表现出更多的自我提升，但比没有亚洲血统的美国人表现出更少的自我提升。将这些结果与我们关于积极错觉的了解结合起来，许多研究人员得出结论，东亚人没有表现出之前描述的积极错觉。其他人则认为，这种观点是对一个更复杂想法的过度简化，这个想法认为东亚人的自我提升程度低于西方人，但高于零（参见 Heine，2003）。

One final note on the cross-cultural nature of self-enhancement: Recent research has shown that, due to increasing internet usage (and, therefore, exposure to the strongly self-enhancing culture of the United States), India is beginning to show increases in self-enhancement, while still showing less self-enhancement than the West (Lane et al., 2017). This suggests that, as the internet makes the world even smaller in the future, the differences between Eastern and Western cultures may become smaller as well.
关于自我提升的跨文化性质的最后一点：最近的研究表明，由于互联网使用量的增加（因此，接触美国强烈的自我提升文化），印度开始显示出自我提升的增加，尽管仍然比西方少（Lane 等人，2017 年）。这表明，随着互联网使世界在未来变得更加紧密，东西方文化之间的差异也可能变得更小。

Source: https://www.coursera.org/learn/psychology-of-the-self/supplement/h2EP0/self-enhancement