ARTICLE NO. RP972188 The Multifaceted Self Effect: Flexibility or Merely Self-Enhancement?

Previous research has shown that people ascribe more traits to themselves than to others, and more traits to liked others than to disliked others, suggesting that the self and liked others are viewed as ‘‘multifaceted.’ ’ A limitation of those studies was their use of generally desirable traits. The present studies asked subjects to describe themselves and liked and disliked well-known others and acquaintances on trait pairs spanning the full range of social desirability. The results for desirable traits replicated previous studies, but the results for undesirable traits did not. Sub-jects judged themselves to have the same number of undesirable traits as others and judged liked others to have fewer undesirable traits than disliked others. Nonde-pressed subjects showed these biases to enhance the self and liked others to a greater degree than did depressed subjects. 1997 Academic Press Do people perceive themselves as multifaceted and as more multifaceted than others? That is, do people describe themselves as having many different (and often contrasting and contradictory) traits? Several researchers have attempted to address these questions by presenting people with lists of traits and asking them to indicate which traits describe themselves or which de-scribe various other people. When Monson, Tanke, and Lund (1980) gave subjects such a list, they found that their subjects used more traits, including more contrasting traits (such as ‘‘serious’ ’ and ‘‘carefree’’), to describe the self than to describe others. Sande, Goethals, and Radloff (1988) presented subjects with pairs of contrasting traits and offered subjects four response options: ‘‘trait a,’ ’ ‘‘trait b,’ ’ ‘‘both,’ ’ or ‘‘neither.’ ’ Across several studies, Correspondence and reprint requests should be addressed to Kenneth Locke, Departmen