Abstract: | Explored the relationship between self-esteem, the perception of competence, and actual competence when performance is attributed to oneself or to someone else. 44 male and 43 female undergraduates with high and low self-esteem performed a concept-formation task and evaluated their performance; 1 wk later they either rerated their own performance after watching a videotape of their previous session or rated the videotaped performance of "another S," actually a model who mimicked their previous performance. High-self-esteem Ss perceived themselves as doing better on the task than low-self-esteem Ss, although their performance was actually comparable. The 2 groups' evaluations differed only when they thought they were assessing themselves and not when they felt they were evaluating someone else. Potential mechanisms accounting for the differences in self-evaluations are explored. (34 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved) |