BazermanMoore

90 Chapter 5: Motivational and Emotional Influences on Decision Making
POSITIVE ILLUSIONS
Taylor (1989) argues that most people view themselves, the world, and the future in a
considerably more positive light than is objectively accurate. Taylor and Brown (1988)
suggest that positive illusions enhance and protect self-esteem, increase personal contentment,
help individuals to persist at difficult tasks, and facilitate coping with aversive
and uncontrollable events. Taylor (1989) even argues that positive illusions are beneficial
to physical and mental health. Greenwald (1980) has compared the human ego to a
totalitarian state in which unflattering or undesirable facts are suppressed in the interest
of self-enhancement, and that we write our own history by altering our memories to
make them consistent with these self-flattering beliefs.
Consistent with this perspective, research confirms that people are motivated to
view themselves positively, as opposed to accurately (Dunning, 2005). For instance,
people react to negative information about themselves by making more self-serving attributions
that affirm their worth (Crocker, Thompson, McGraw, & Ingerman, 1987).
On the other hand, when people find their self-worth affirmed, they feel less need to
make self-serving judgments (Sherman & Kim, 2005).
The egoistic motive to affirm self-worth may help explain a variety of research results.
For instance, people tend to believe that the groups to which they belong are
superior to other groups (Gramzow & Gaertner, 2005). People like the letters in their
names more than they like other letters (Nuttin, 1985, 1987). People are disproportionately
likely to end up living in cities that reflect their names, such as people named
Louis living in St. Louis (Pelham, Mirenberg, & Jones, 2002). People are also disproportionately
likely to marry people whose names resemble theirs (Jones, Pelham,
Carvallo, & Mirenberg, 2004). In fact, liking our own characteristics may help to explain
the endowment effect discussed in Chapter 4, in which mere ownership of an
object produces a special appreciation that increases its subjective value (Morewedge,
Shu, Gilbert, & Wilson, 2007; Van Boven, Dunning, & Loewenstein, 2000). Evidence
suggests, however, that these effects operate at an unconscious level and are strongest
when people are responding quickly and automatically (Koole, Dijksterhuis, & van
Knippenberg, 2001). When they think about the question more systematically (i.e.,
engaging System 2 thinking), for instance, people no longer prefer the letters in their
names over other letters (Koole, Dijksterhuis, & van Knippenberg, 2001).
The Limits of Positive Illusions
More recent work has questioned the strength of the totalitarian ego’s relentless pursuit
of self-enhancement. Some of this work shows the limits of self-enhancement. Other
research documents self-diminution, in which people report that they are worse than
they actually are or claim that they are worse than others, when in fact they’re not.
Other work questions whether positive illusions are really good for us after all.
The extent to which people can maintain unrealistically positive beliefs about
themselves may be constrained to some degree by the objectivity of these beliefs, their
credibility, and the potential to disconfirm them (Allison, Messick, & Goethals, 1989;
Kunda, 1990). For example, it is easier for individuals to maintain the view that they
are more honest than others than to maintain the belief that they are better tennis