User:Slmcguinness

Helloooo!! I am currently in my third year of an undergraduate degree in Psychology at the University of Southampton. I am part of the Self and Identity Task Force (a sub-project of  WikiProject Psychology and will soon be improving / creating a few articles relating to Psychology, more specifically Self and Identity.

The article I have been working on is Illusory superiority. A plan of the article is copied below for my course tutor, Aiden Gregg, to see. Nearly all of the content listed below can be found on the Illusory superiority article.

Plan
More references needed

Correct grammar / sentence structure

Find new research

Change order of article

Elaborate on missing / ambiguous sections / references

Related articles / subjects
Self-enhancement

Self improvement

Possible papers to mention
Krizan & Windschitl (2009) – wishful thinking / desirability bias meta-analysis

Wegner & Fowers (2008) – parenting

Questions to answer
Individual differences?

More readily seen in “important” characteristics / tasks?

Why does it occur?

1. Intro & definition
a.	Early use / coining of the phrase “illusory superiority”

b.	Early experimental research

2. How it may manifest itself in different situations
a.	Performance on work / tests / intelligence

b.	Social context / peers / peer evaluation (Alicke et al.)

c. Relationship happiness comparative to others

d.	Health

e.	Other areas (such as driving ability)

a.    Can it be explained by:
i. Social psych

ii. Evolutionary psych

b.	Five primary mechanisms (Alicke et al.):
i. Selection

ii. Egocentrism

iii. Focalism

iv. Self vs. Aggregate

v. Heuristic

4. What factors affect the strength / likelihood of the Better-Than-Average Effect occurring?
a.	Interpretability / ambiguity of trait

b.	Method of comparison (in/direct, wording)

c.	Comparison target (specific person, people in general, a statistic)

d.	Controllability

e.	Individual differences of judge

f.	Personal “importance” of characteristics

5. Individual differences in Illusory Superiority
a.	Cultural differences (Hamamura, Heine & Takemoto, 2007 paper)

b.	Gender differences

c.	Individual differences caused by another factor? (Brown, 1986 paper)

d.	Experimenter effects??

9. See also
a.	Looking-glass self

b.	Self-monitoring