Quantifying the Association of Self-Enhancement Bias With Self-Ratings of Personality and Life Satisfaction

Kwan, John, Kenny, Bond, and Robins conceptualize self-enhancement as a favorable comparison of self-judgments with judgments of and by others. Applying a modified version of Kwan et al.’s approach to behavior observation data, we show that the resulting measure of self-enhancement bias is highly reliable, predicts self-ratings of intelligence as well as does actual intelligence, interacts with item desirability in predicting responses to questionnaire items, and also predicts general life satisfaction. Consistent with previous research, however, self-ratings of intelligence did not become more valid when controlling for self-enhancement bias. We also show that common personality scales like the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale reflect self-enhancement at least as strongly as do scales that were designed particularly for that purpose (i.e., “social desirability scales”). The relevance of these findings in regard to the validity and utility of social desirability scales is discussed