University of Melbourne.
Psychol Sci. 2011 Oct;22(10):1254-8. doi: 10.1177/0956797611417003. Epub 2011 Sep 23.
People's self-perception biases often lead them to see themselves as better than the average person (a phenomenon known as self-enhancement). This bias varies across cultures, and variations are typically explained using cultural variables, such as individualism versus collectivism. We propose that socioeconomic differences among societies--specifically, relative levels of economic inequality--play an important but unrecognized role in how people evaluate themselves. Evidence for self-enhancement was found in 15 diverse nations, but the magnitude of the bias varied. Greater self-enhancement was found in societies with more income inequality, and income inequality predicted cross-cultural differences in self-enhancement better than did individualism/collectivism. These results indicate that macrosocial differences in the distribution of economic goods are linked to microsocial processes of perceiving the self.
人们的自我认知偏见常常使他们认为自己比一般人更好（一种被称为自我提升的现象）。这种偏见在不同文化中有所不同，通常可以用文化变量来解释，例如个人主义与集体主义。我们提出，社会之间的社会经济差异——具体来说，是经济不平等的相对水平——在人们如何评价自己方面起着重要但未被认识到的作用。在 15 个不同的国家中发现了自我提升的证据，但偏见的程度有所不同。在收入不平等程度较高的社会中，自我提升的程度更大，收入不平等比个人主义/集体主义更能预测自我提升的跨文化差异。这些结果表明，经济商品分配的宏观社会差异与感知自我的微观社会过程有关。
