PostDoctoral Research Fellowship

Naumann Laura P, Berkeley CA

Investigators

Abstract

This research project extends the conceptual and methodological tools of the Social Relations Model (SRM) to a long-standing debate in cultural psychology: Do Asian-Americans fail to show the self-enhancement bias that Westerners often show and instead show a more negative self-effacement bias? In particular, the Fellow will adapt Kwan and colleagues? recent model of self-enhancement bias which emphasizes that two factors need to be considered to accurately estimate an individual?s self-enhancement (or effacement) bias. That is, self-perceptions must be compared both to how an individual perceives people in general (i.e., perceiver effect) and how others consensually perceive the behavior of the target individual (i.e., target effect). The Postdoctoral Fellow will extend this SRM-based approach to cultural research by including both in-group and out-group perceptions. She will be able to examine three kinds of differences between Asian and European Americans within one comprehensive design: perceiver effects (e.g., do Asians generally perceive people more critically or negatively? Do Asians only perceive other Asians more critically?), target effects (e.g., do Asians score lower in certain desirable social characteristics?), and various aspects of self-enhancement bias (e.g., do Asians perceive themselves in self-enhancing or self-effacing ways? Do biased self-perceptions affect adjustment in a positive or negative way?). She will compare conclusions derived from the two earlier conceptions of self-enhancement (namely the social comparison and the self-insight perspective) and then test whether Asian self-perceptions are realistic, self-enhancing, or self-effacing. Finally, the Fellow will study the academic and social consequences of self-perception biases in college students of different ethnic backgrounds. To test these hypotheses, the Fellow will use a repeated-measures design in which participants rate their own behavior and the behavior of the other group members in a specific group interaction context. In a round-robin design, Asian and European American participants (assigned to 6-person groups) will provide ratings of self and others on several positively and negatively-valenced behavioral attributes, as well as social adjustment variables such as liking and interpersonal closeness. Furthermore, the mixed ingroup-outgroup feature of my design will allow the Fellow to also compute the perceiver, target, and self-enhancement effects specifically for one?s own ethnic in-group (e.g., Asians perceptions of other Asians) or an ethnic out-group. This research should provide a more complete and contextually nuanced understanding of how social perception and self-enhancement biases differ across Asian-Americans and other ethnic groups in the U.S. For example, this research importantly extends previous work by controlling for individual differences in both perceiver and target effects, thus beginning to resolve the inconsistent findings about self-enhancement for Asian and European Americans, as well as examining if there are personal or social consequences of this bias. Additionally, this research emphasizes the importance of the cultural context?conclusions about self-enhancement may critically depend on social comparison standards (e.g., comparing the self to an out-group or one?s ethnic in-group). In the future, the Fellow plans to conduct research that takes a cultural approach to studying social perception by examining how other factors such as ethnic identity strength, biculturalism, and acculturation shape self-perception processes. Specifically, she hopes to extend this work to other underrepresented populations including African Americans and Latinos. This proposal for postdoctoral training and research stems from earlier research that she conducted at UC-Berkeley, which has been funded initially by a NSF Pre-doctoral fellowship and a Ford Foundation Dissertation-Year fellowship. The Fellow looks forward to involving future generations of undergraduate and graduate students in research on minority and diversity issues and generating methodologically sound research on these topics.