Self vs. Peer Evaluations of Confidence
As early as the 1950’s researchers noticed self-enhancement effects on personality assessments. Still today there is currently disagreement on whether study participants and informants are accurate judges of personality, and whether any discrepancy between these judges is meaningful. I hypothesized that self-ratings of courage will be higher than other-ratings of an individual’s courage because of these self enhancement effects. Using data from the Personality Projects and the Development of Virtue archive, I used a paired t-test to analyze the differences between subject and informant courage ratings. Contrary to the primary hypothesis, self-rating of courage was lower than informant ratings, t(200) = -6.22, p < .001. In addition, there was no difference between informant-reports provided by participants’ friends or family members. These results seemed to coincide with a study done by Wood et al. (2010) which suggested that studies utilizing peer informants could have more accurate results with informants across different acquaintanceship levels with the target.