Slmcguinness

Slmcguinness
— Wikipedian ♀ —
Name	Sophi McGuinness
Born	December 1988
Current location	Southampton, UK
Education and employment
Occupation	Student
College	University of Southampton
Contact info
Email	sm24v07@soton.ac.uk

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.

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

More references needed

Correct grammar / sentence structure

Find new research

Change order of article

Elaborate on missing / ambiguous sections / references

Possible papers to mention

Krizan & Windschitl (2009) – wishful thinking / desirability bias meta-analysis

Wegner & Fowers (2008) – parenting

Questions to answer

Individual differences?

More readily seen in “important” characteristics / tasks?

Why does it occur?

Order of article

1. Intro & definition

a. Early use / coining of the phrase “illusory superiority”

b. Early experimental research

2. How it may manifest itself in different situations

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?

a. Can it be explained by:

i. Social psych

ii. Evolutionary psych

b. Five primary mechanisms (Alicke et al.):

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?

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

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

7. Illusory immunity to bias

8. Problems with interpretation of results

9. See also

a. Looking-glass self

b. Self-monitoring