THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYwhich a person believes they are a fraud – that their achievements are
down to luck and that their abilities overrated by others. Originally it was
thought that women were particularly prone, but more recent research
suggests that men are just as susceptible. Psychologists aren’t immune
either. In 1984 Margaret Gibbs of Fairleigh Dickinson University
reported that 69 percent of the US psychologists she surveyed reported
having these feelings
Taken altogether these studies seem to suggest that, far from being
based on reality, our knowledge of ourselves is positively skewed. On
any given dimension, from driving ability to popularity, we display an
astonishing tendency to see ourselves as better than most. Helping
maintain this rose-tinted view is a creative memory system that’s happy
to rewrite significant chapters of our past to create an account that fits
How culture can influence your view of yourself
The way you see yourself could be influenced, in part, by the kind
of cultural background that you’re from. Angela Leung at Singapore
Management University and Dov Cohen at the University of Illinois
proposed this in a 2007 study in which they asked American partici-
pants with different ethnic backgrounds to imagine travelling in a
skyscraper lift to meet a friend on the top floor, while that same friend
was simultaneously travelling downwards to the skyscraper foyer.
The idea was that participants’ performance in the next stage of the
task would be affected by whether they’d imagined that skyscraper
scenario from their own or the friend’s perspective. That’s exactly what
seemed to happen. When the participants were subsequently given
a map showing the city “Jackson” and asked to mark the location of a
second city, “Jamestown”, which they were told, ambiguously, was the
“next” city “after” Jackson on the north-south highway, those with a
Euro-American heritage tended to mark Jamestown as being north of
Jackson, consistent with their having imagined the skyscraper scenario
from their own perspective (going up in the lift prompting them to
think of north). By contrast, participants with an Asian heritage tended
to locate Jamestown south of Jackson, consistent with their having
imagined the skyscraper scenario from the perspective of their friend
travelling down in the lift. Leung and Cohen concluded that this and
other findings show how our cultural values are embodied in the
way we see ourselves in the world. Americans with an Asian heritage
place more value on how their actions will look to others and so
view themselves from the outside, the researchers argued, whereas
Americans with a European heritage place more emphasis on knowing
what you want, and so view situations from their own perspective.