#98 - A.,c.,S.c.

Aspiration, Confidence, & Self-Control

ECON 555 Behavioral Economics

Fall 2024

Abstract

This paper explores how self-flattering preferences might influence confidence, self-control, aspirations, and information seeking behavior. The introduction will explain the topic. After establishing an analytical landscape, peer-reviewed articles will be brought into the fold for additional empirical context. The following section will provide critical analysis and evaluation. The paper’s conclusion will discuss implications and possible avenues for future inquiry. 

Introduction

People tend to be less confident with difficult tasks and the opposite is true for easy tasks. How much of these self-appraisals are preemptive defense/coping-mechanisms against social-comparison/desirability? This paper will treat information-literacy as a kind of social capital asset that is difficult to attain/maintain and potentially costly to acquire/hold. This might help explain low-skill information-seeking behaviors and potentially uncover a mutually-reinforcing relationship between ignorance and egotistical insecurity.

Self-flattery is a tool often used to help numb the pain of self-control failures, compensate (in different ways) for over/under-confidence, and meet perceived social needs. Self-control deficits and confidence levels might be moderated by egotism. Sometimes people are just ‘keeping up with the Jones’, but other times competition with the Jones’ is sufficiently caution provoking. Expecting less from one’s self may be an effective (albeit potentially suppressing) strategy for avoiding egotistical injuries, but that entails lower goal-setting ceilings. A sense of ambition is riskier than blending into a crowd. Group identity politics mobilize masses into identifying with ideal archetypes (that may represent more of a caricature than any kind of just characterization). Instead of cognitive liberty, people regularly subordinate themselves to tribal/political group-think echo chambers. Conforming to projecting a flattering ideal-self may represent a submission to other-imposed power over self-control.

These types of other-imposed prophecies can compromise the quality of cultural traits/values if subversive. This results in a mix of the greater fool theory, sunken cost aversion, and egotistical consistency. When people attach to & identify with their positions, the risk of embarrassment becomes apparent. When a culture doesn’t show grace in the face of epistemological humility, then burying a lie or being avoidant might appear to be safer options than apologizing and ‘correcting the record.’ This is made even worse when people histrionically defend their ill-researched takes. The pressure to appear confident ends up degenerating into burnt bridges and an almost cultish throwing of relationships under the bus of fragility. Merit might be a large of the solving these problems, but there’s real reason to wonder whether informational competence incentives are being outweighed by perceived risk of becoming an exiled & isolated outcast.

Where the group-hostilities and loyalties divide a culture into groups that punish dissention (e.g., not towing political partisans or failing to align one’s language usage with a given ‘in-group’ narrative framing), people may be primed to suppress themselves. There are many potential issues that can arise from a status-quo such as the one described herein, but being uninformed & illiterate might be amongst the most salient.

Hopefully this paper is able to shed some light on what it might take to help people practice self-control and allow them to confidently appraise their goals, needs, limitations, and capabilities. This might be specifically useful for bolstering efforts to increase information literacy in a hyper-politicized societal & media context.

Background Literature

This section will discuss the five scholarly articles that inspired the arguments of this paper. The background briefs will cover the methodologies used, results found, and conclusions reached.

Moore & Healy investigated the overlapping operationalization between approaches of overconfidence measurement (overplacement, overestimation, and overprecision) and the relationships between them (2008). For 18 rounds, they issued 82 university students three 10-tiem quizzes (categorized as easy, medium, and hard difficulty) and observed subjects’ assessments (about their own performance and that of the during different stages of the experiment (prior, interim, posterior, and resolution) (Moore & Healy, 2008, p. 505-508). Moore & Healy found that their participants underestimated themselves on the easy quizzes, overestimated themselves on difficult quizzes, and were accurate (on average) with medium quizzes (2008, p. 509). They also found that participants overplaced themselves on the easier quizzes, underplaced with the difficult quizzes, and demanded no over/under-placement with the medium quizzes (Moore & Healy, 2008, p. 509-510). Moore & Healy also found overprecision to be present across quiz difficulties (73.1% accuracy coupled with 90.5% confidence) and that it increased throughout the stages (with 55.1% at the prior phase and 85.6/84.4% at interim/posterior phases) (2008, p. 510). They demonstrated some of the distinctions between ‘overconfidence’ disaggregates and the problems with treating them as operationally interchangeable/synonymous (e.g., confounding the relationship between overestimation & overprecision or the correlation between overestimation & underplacement as difficult increases) (Moore & Healy, 2008).

Duckworth et al. reviewed self-control techniques and organized them into categories that distinguished between self-deployed & other-deployed strategies and situational & cognitive intervention targeting (2018). Their psychologically informed policy recommendations can help reduce failures of self-control by identifying the best strategies for a given set of goals/contexts and illustrating a vantage point beyond sheer willpower (e.g., cold turkey) (Duckworth et al., 2018). Duckworth et al. found that other-deployed strategies might be effective, but they don’t help individuals develop their capacities for self-control as much as self-deployed (2018). Cognitive strategies can be better for more internal temptations, but are easier to reverse or abandon (Duckworth et al., 2018). Physical strategies are usually more ideal for physical temptations (even more so with costly situational modification) (Duckworth et al., 2018).

How is a trait encoded/defined by a given person (in a particular context)? Dunning argued that people’s schemata of social traits and concepts are the building blocks of social cognition and that these schemata are influenced by motivations to retain self-flattering images of themselves (1999). A ‘schema’ was defined as “a cognitive structure that represents knowledge about a concept or a type of stimulus, including its attributes and the relations among those attributes” (Dunning, 1999, p. 2).  What Dunning argued is that people hold self-serving schemata for standards of performance & emphasis of attributes (1999). According to Dunning, “people assign self-serving meaning to the social concepts they use to judge themselves and others,” (1999, p. 5). Furthermore, “people can choose or create environments in which their proficiencies are crucial and their liabilities unimportant” (Dunning, 1999, p. 5). Dunning explained how self-enhancement, self-maintenance, & self-protection were each operationally distinguished from one another (1999). Dunning also discussed self-verifying views of self, avoidance of information contrary to a ‘preset’ level of self-esteem, motivated reasoning, and methodological issues with measuring self-worth (1999). It might almost be irrational to consider motivation without factoring in the self (& selves).

Bargh investigated subliminal influences on social cognition in light of two developments in the field of social cognition research: (1) “growing evidence that much of social judgment and behavior occur without conscious awareness or intent” and (2) “the substantive moderating influence of social- and self-related goal pursuits on basic cognitive and reasoning processes,” (2002, p. 280). Looking “beyond hedonic impulses and physiological need states,” the study asked about “any kind of goal or motivation a person can have consciously, such as self-protective motivation, performance – or achievement-related motivation, and interpersonal goals,” (Bargh, 2002, p. 280). Bargh discussed subliminal activation of mental concepts like intelligence, politeness, power, cooperation, and achievement (2002, p. 281). Bargh added that most experimental research “produced the activation of these concepts through priming manipulations that typically involve exposure to the concept and close synonyms” (2002, p. 281). Bargh concluded with a warning about motives & needs being targeted to benefit consumer research and the fields continuing effort in defending against unwanted influence and regaining control (2002).

The last article is an illustrative example of how this combination of articles provides insight into how these issues might affect a specific goal (that goal being information skill improvement). Gross argued that competency theory (which “suggests the people who function at a low level of skill like the metacognitive ability to recognize their own confidence and are unable to accurately assess the skills of others”) entails that these people: (1) “tend to overestimate their own abilities,” (2) “tend to overestimate their own abilities and to proceed with confidence as they develop awkward strategies and make poor decision,” and (3) ignorance to incompetence means lower likelihood of seeking services or developing skills  (2005, 155).

Critical Analysis & Evaluation

All of this is interesting when considering the ecosystem that information literacy seekers operate within. Being ‘fluent’ is to ‘literacy’ as ‘naives’ are to ‘sophisticates.’ People may take comfort from their performance with low-difficulty disinformation detection (maybe especially so where they can find shelter in the company of fellow fluent naïves). It would be sound to assume an overconfidence from being able to identify easy nonsense, but that might lead to higher overprecision and overestimation. Without understanding about more complex/difficult deciphering needs, it may remain challenging for low-skill information seekers to be motivated toward behavioral change. The task looks tall and the rewards unapparent in many respects. Are people generally rewarded for thinking outside the box and beyond dissonance?

What can be especially challenging is that journalistic coverage may undergird people’s preferences for (& interests in) self-flattering schemata. Stories get covered and appealing to the self makes for sensational clickbait. Kurt Lewin’s field theory (as cited in Bargh, 2002, p. 283) asserted “that one could not induce in people goals they do not already have themselves, but you could influence them by activating or manipulating them by activating or manipulating the goals they already possessed.” Subliminal perception techniques are more effective when they appeal to pre-existing anchors. Knowing the goals/needs of individuals can make them easier to nudge, but situational and cognitive interventions could be utilized to inform appraisals of goals/needs if people would prefer consenting to being subliminally primed & predisposed. Even if a crowd is fine with outsourcing their critical thinking, maybe goals/needs should be subordinate to ethics beyond self-flattery. To the extent that people buy argumentum ad verecundiam and halo-effect, they will effectively gatekeep themselves.

When someone decides whether information is worth seeking, they might also have to consider how costly it might be signal that one has asked the types of questions necessary for reducing dissonance. Group dissonance makes for a disorderly group. How well can they afford to trade the floated currencies they’ve been dealing in? What do group members stand to lose from someone really rocking the boat? In order to prevent the whole group from getting egg on its face, the dissonant can be scapegoated and dismissed (as may be traditional). That isn’t to say that all groups behave with such scholarly malpractice, but there is good analytical reason to be weary of Machiavellian affirmation of faulty priors and validation of false beliefs. Appeasing and pandering to ignorance/incompetence doesn’t foster self-efficacy. Similarly, socially sanctioning people who violate groupthink might be a great way to hinder any kind of collective-efficacy. With individual and collective risk, it is a wonder why such a state of affairs would persist.

These articles provided tremendous insight into their specific lines of inquiry, but together they point to how deeply vulnerable people are to priming, framing, cognitive predispositions, etc. It isn’t as simple as politicians & media merely appealing to the goals/needs/values that people already hold. When people face punitive action for disagreeing about what they’re motivated by, those suppressed motivations might get repressed. The self becomes more a performative ritual than an honest signal of character, expertise, quality, etc. It may be easier to be a follower than a leader, but finding contentment with one’s choices/decisions takes more than shortcuts. How does one find themselves virtuous whilst opting out of social responsibility, failing to develop competence/confidence, neglecting self-control, being afraid to become literate because of peer pressure, and doing everything they can to be liked?

Conclusion

Perhaps there need to be more explicit conversations about what should be flattering. If a culture doesn’t value moral-posturing & empty virtue-signaling, then it isn’t a rewarding endeavor. Can an audience can choose how sensitive is egotistical motivation to unconscious influence? If appeals to ego and polarized tribalism are less persuasive, then norms might not converge to dissuade people from accepting the costs of holding themselves to higher standards. This paper has thoroughly expressed a concern for the pressure of flattering others and how that might end up holding people back via self-limiting beliefs that excuse accountability for pursuing excellence.  

What is a culture impressed by if it is filled with people who regulate thinking into to being taboo? The level to which cognitive dissonance is collectively tolerated (or not) is a reflection of a society’s appetite for new information. If people are fixed into cognitive camps, then they may not be as receptive to divergent thinking or contradictory information. What’s scary is considering that people could actually lose face for believing that they shouldn’t just follow mobs. Social instability generates a sense of loss aversion and endowment effect about the status quo. Social judgment might have adverse/unintended consequences if it isn’t calibrated, but there’s also a chance that the context has been built with consensus errors. The trouble is that groupthink makes it more costly to address consensus errors. Individuals may have to make helpful sacrifices to inspire the kind of change that will allow for the necessary cultural development.

Whether people limit themselves of their own volition or through cultural demands, an adequate approach to improving these issues might need to ask whether situational or cognitive interventions are best. Subliminal self-flattering info-foraging behaviors might best be combatted with reframing interventions (ones that validate concerns for short-run social costs and provide alternative (likely intrinsic) reasons to value the pursuit.

When people tire of being just literate enough to be effectively nudged, they might reassess their cost-benefit/risk-reward analyses. Managing their image might have broader implications they’d yet to consider. Maybe their ‘self’ is demotivated by their environment. Does a culture seek that outcome? There are many different ways to view these issues and future research will do will to keep in mind the complication of the matters at hand.

References

Bargh, J. A. (2002). Losing consciousness: Automatic influences on consumer judgment, behavior, and motivation. Journal of Consumer Research, 29(2), 280–285. https://doi.org/10.1086/341577

Duckworth, A. L., Milkman, K. L., & Laibson, D. (2018). Beyond willpower: Strategies for reducing failures of self-control. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 19(3), 102–129. https://www.jstor.org/stable/48559154

Dunning, D. (1999). A newer look: Motivated social cognition and the schematic representation of social concepts. Psychological Inquiry, 10(1), 1–11. http://www.jstor.org/stable/1449517

Gross, M. (2005). The impact of low-level skills on information-seeking behavior: Implications of Competency Theory for research and practice. Reference & User Services Quarterly, 45(2), 155–162. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20864481

Moore, D. A., & Healy, P. J. (2008). The trouble with overconfidence. Psychological Review, 115(2), 502–517. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.115.2.502

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Thank you, Dr. Islam. You forced me to write a decent paper.