The Effects Of Self-esteem On Self-enhancement And Ingroup Bias

Self-enhancement bias represents the degree of self-enhancement. It describes a kind of overly positive self-enhance illusions. However, there are some irreconcilable differences in the studies of conceptualizing and measuring it. Both social comparison approach and self-insight approach mix up some unwanted components into the real self-enhancement bias. A new interpersonal approach extracts more accurate bias from the comprehensive interpersonal perception, which this thesis will adopt. Ingroup bias refers to the tendency to evaluate one's own group more favorably than outgroup. According to some literature, self-esteem is the common mechanism of self-enhancement and ingroup bias. Moreover, the attribute of trait has some effects on self-enhancement, such as trait ambiguity and trait importance. It has not ascertained their effects on ingroup bias. In fact, there are plenty of researches in about the two themes, but in our country few studies has be carried out. This thesis will explore the effects that self-esteem and the attribute of trait work on self-enhancement and ingroup bias.Focusing on friends as ingroup members in college students, the thesis applies questionnaire method, including five stages. At the first stage, some positive and negative traits were collected by open questionnaire and then 12 ambiguous and unambiguous ones were selected. At stage 2, another group of subjects assessed trait ambiguity and trait valence about the 12 adjectives. On the basis of stage 2, the final questionnaire was formed. Then, some advertisement were put in the campus to recruit subjects who must be close friends and participate the study together. At the final stage, primal data were calculated to assess self-enhancement bias and then all of the data were analysised through spss programs.The results show that: the persons who are high in self-esteem (HSEs) show more self-enhancement and ingroup bias on the ambiguous traits than the...