Origins
Like many forms of human perception, self-perception is prone to illusion. Positive illusions have been commonly understood as one of the apparent effects of self-enhancement, a desire to maximize the positivity of one's self-views and a function of boosting self-esteem. It might be due to the desire to see oneself more favorably relative to one's peers. These kinds of self-serving attributions seemed to be displayed by positive self-viewers only. In fact, the negative-viewers were found to display the opposite pattern. Research suggests that there may be modest genetic contributions to the ability to develop positive illusions Early environment also plays an important role: people are more able to develop these positive beliefs in nurturing environments than in harsh ones.
Alternative explanations involve dimensions like the easiness and commonness of the tasks. In addition, tasks that shifted attention from the self to the comparative target would stop people overly optimising.
The cultural prevalence also has a significant role in positive illusions. Although it is easy to document positive illusions in individualistic Western cultures, people in collectivist East Asian cultures are much less likely to self-enhance and, indeed, are often self-effacing instead.
Most studies find that people tend to have inflated views of themselves. The research indicates that the relationship between people's self-evaluations and objective assessments is relatively weak. One explanation for this is that most people only have mild positive illusions.
However, according to recent studies there is evidence that there are significant individual differences between the strength of positive illusions people have. Therefore some people may have extremely inflated self-views, some mild and some very little and when examined across a population this effect appears weak.
Read more about this topic: Positive Illusions
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