What do you attribute your victory over your friend? Did you win because you were more competent than your contestant? Or, did your opponent lose because he/she was inferior? You may have won because of mere luck.
DIAGRAM OF THE EXPERIMENTAL SETTING
Alike et al. (1997) conducted a social-comparison experiment utilizing aconfederate either win or lose in an intellectual competing game with a naïve participant. They found their American participants attributed their victory to their own ability, whereas they tended to regard their defeat caused by the winner’s exceptional ability. Alike et al. concluded that people tend to use these attribution tendencies to protect their self-esteem. “I lost, but it was because the contestant was a genius. No one could outperform him.” They dubbed it “Genius Effect.”
WINNERS AND LOSERS RATED FOR THEIR INTELLIGENCE BY WINNERS, LOSERS AND OBSERVERS (TWO OBSERVERS’ RATINGS WERE COMBINED IN THE FIGURE. THE VERTICAL BARS SHOW STANDARD DEVIATIONS. THE TWO DOWNWARD ARROWS SHOW THE MODESTY EFFECT; WINNERS AND LOSERS RATED THEMSELVES LOWER THAN THE OTHERS DID.)
In the Alicke et al. study, participants were able to exaggerate the ability of their contestant who was in reality a confederate because they were unfamiliar each other. What happens if a person wins or loses in a social comparison with a familiar person, such as a friend? However, it could not be possible to conduct such an experiment with pairs of genuine participants without having one of them as an experimenter’s confederate. Mori and Mori (2013) conducted a social comparison experiment with pairs of Japanese participants, who tried to solve anagram tasks in a competing way. The crucial point of their study was that they presented the anagram tasks in two different difficulty levels by utilizing a presentation trick so that one of each participant pair would observe easier tasks than the opponent. The ones given the easier tasks outperformed their counterparts. Mori and Mori also manipulated the social relations of participant pairs; familiar or unfamiliar pairs. Note that the unfamiliar condition was equivalent to the Alicke et al. experiment.
Mori and Mori found both winners and losers tended to evaluate their abilities lower than observers evaluated them. These tendencies were similar in both the familiar and unfamiliar conditions. From these results, they concluded “Japanese are modest even when they are winners.”Being modest might be the most suitable strategy in a densely populated society such as Japan.
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