Yang Ying, Zhong Bowei, Zhang Wenjie, Fan Wei
Department of Psychology, School of Education Science, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, People's Republic of China.
Hunan Key Laboratory of Cognition and Human Behavior, Hunan Normal University, Changsha, People's Republic of China.
Psychol Res Behav Manag. 2024 Jul 29;17:2819-2834. doi: 10.2147/PRBM.S467437. eCollection 2024.
Self-deception refers to an individual holding inflated beliefs about their abilities, plays a crucial role in human behavior and decision-making. Individuals may inflate their abilities when subject to comparisons with others. This study examined the impact of social comparison on self-deception through the implementation of two behavioral experiments.
In Experiment 1, we recruited a sample of 152 undergraduate students. Participants were falsely informed that they performed better (downward comparison) and worse (upward comparison) than average on a game. Subsequently, their level of self-deception was assessed by asking them to predict their performance in a future game, with more inflated predictions indicating greater self-deception. In Experiment 2, we gathered 126 undergraduate students to broaden the current study. This experiment examined the combined effects of comparison direction and comparison gap on self-deceptive behavior.
The findings showed that self-deception was more common in circumstances of upward comparison than in downward comparison or no comparison (Experiment 1). Furthermore, Individuals were more inclined to participate in self-deception when encountering a notable performance gap relative to others, particularly in scenarios involving upward social comparison (Experiment 2).
The findings suggested that when confronted with threatening social comparative information, people tended to use self-deception to protect themselves. Members of the large gap group experienced strong feelings of unfairness and negative emotions, which led to self-protective behaviors and a greater likelihood of self-deception.
自我欺骗是指个体对自身能力持有夸大的信念，在人类行为和决策中起着关键作用。当个体与他人进行比较时，可能会夸大自己的能力。本研究通过两项行为实验检验了社会比较对自我欺骗的影响。
在实验1中，我们招募了152名本科生作为样本。参与者被错误告知他们在一款游戏中的表现比平均水平好（向下比较）或差（向上比较）。随后，通过要求他们预测自己在未来游戏中的表现来评估他们的自我欺骗程度，预测越夸大表明自我欺骗程度越高。在实验2中，我们收集了126名本科生以拓展当前研究。该实验考察了比较方向和比较差距对自我欺骗行为的综合影响。
研究结果表明，自我欺骗在向上比较的情况下比向下比较或无比较的情况下更为常见（实验1）。此外，当个体与他人存在显著的表现差距时，尤其是在涉及向上社会比较的情况下，他们更倾向于参与自我欺骗（实验2）。
研究结果表明，当面对具有威胁性的社会比较信息时，人们倾向于使用自我欺骗来保护自己。差距较大组的成员会产生强烈的不公平感和负面情绪，这导致了自我保护行为以及更大的自我欺骗可能性。
