Coming to terms with failure: Private self-enhancement and public self-effacement

Abstract

People regard themselves in more favorable terms than they regard others. Two experiments examined how this bias is influenced by threats to self-esteem (i.e., failure) and the private vs public nature of the context in which judgments of self and others are made. Private failure led subjects to exaggerate their superiority over others; public failure was associated with more egalitarian evaluations of self and others. Independent of these effects, high self-esteem subjects were more apt to respond to failure by increasing their superiority over others than were low self-esteem subjects. Theoretical implications of the results are discussed.