We compared the sensitivity of two classes of decision tasks to social desirability: Description-based tasks and experience-based tasks. Participants completed a battery of decision tasks in two conditions: A Control condition in which they were asked to perform their best, and an Impression condition in which they were required to impress judges in the context of hiring decisions. The Impressi...

According to alcohol myopia theory (Steele and Josephs in Am Psychol 45:921–933, 1990) intoxicated people disproportionally focus on the most salient aspects of a situation and ignore peripheral information. We investigated whether consuming alcohol leads people to disproportionally focus on the desirability rather than feasibility of important personal goals. Students named an important person...

The self-reference effect (SRE), by which encoding of information is done in a self-referential manner (e.g., "Does the word describe you?"), enhances subsequent memory performance. It is thought to reflect that self-reference is a highly practiced task in everyday life. Accordingly, it is expected that the types of tasks that produce memory enhancement vary according to individual differences ...

Multidimensional scaling analysis was used to examine adolescents' cognitive appraisals of major and daily stressful events. The desirability of events was the only salient feature for early adolescents. Middle and late adolescents also appraised events in terms of their desirability; in addition, the amount of impact that events exerted on their lives and the generality of the causes of events...

Social judgment data was analyzed using fuzzy least squares regression analysis based on the extension principle. The proposed analysis is new fuzzy least squares regression analysis in which input data, output data, and coefficients are represented by L-R fuzzy numbers. To evaluate data fitness, we propose a fuzzy version of a squared multiple correlation (R) and conducted an experiment to det...

Kwan, John, Kenny, Bond, and Robins conceptualize self-enhancement as a favorable comparison of self-judgments with judgments of and by others. Applying a modified version of Kwan et al.'s approach to behavior observation data, we show that the resulting measure of self-enhancement bias is highly reliable, predicts self-ratings of intelligence as well as does actual intelligence, interacts with...