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Do friends bound each other's self enhancement tendencies? Do friends display the self serving bias (SSB; i.e. taking individual credit for success but blaming a partner for failure)? Dyads consisting of either friends or strangers engaged in an interdependent-outcomes creativity test, received bogus success or failure feedback at the dyadic level, and made responsibility attributions for the joint test performance. Strangers displayed the SSB. Friends, in contrast, refrained from the SSB: they shared responsibility for both successful and unsuccessful test outcomes. Friendship does place boundaries on self-enhancement.
Friendship improves happiness and abates misery, by the doubling of our joy and the dividing of our grief.
Few men have the strength to honour a friend's success.
Individuals manifest pervasive and persistent motivational strivings for self enhancement (i.e. engagement in thinking or behaving that is likely to put the self under favourable light) or self protection (i.e. avoidance of thinking or behaving that is likely to place the self under unfavourable light).1 Such strivings have been well documented (Brown & Dutton, 1995; Sedikides, 1993; Sedikides & Strube, 1997).
More often than not, self enhancement strivings have been examined in isolation. Much of past research has tested whether individuals self enhance either in the absolute (i.e. `Am I good?') or comparatively to hypothetical others (i.e. `Am I better than the average person?'). On many occasions, however, individuals gauge their perceived merit relative to the perceived merit of concrete others. Do individuals self enhance in a social and, more specifically, relational context? What is, if any, the moderating influence of relational context on self-enhancement? These are the general issues with which the present research is concerned.
Relational context is defined here in terms of persons with whom the individual has a close relationship (i.e. friendship). Will individuals self enhance or will they refrain from self enhancement when in a friendship relationship? As the quote from Cicero implies, friendship will nurture self-enhancement. However, as Aeschylus suggests, friendship will inhibit self enhancement. These contrasting views are tested in this research.
Does friendship augment or curtail individual self-enhancement?
Two theoretical hypotheses were developed to account for the influence of friendship on individual self-enhancement: the relationship-as-enabler hypothesis and the relationship-as-bound hypothesis (Sedikides, Campbell, Reeder, & Elliot, 1998). The former speaks...