Children with unrealistic perceptions of their academic abilities can harm their relationships at school, according to a recent study.
German researchers found that these unrealistic views will most likely damage a child's relationship with others in the classroom: the more one student feels unrealistically superior to another, the less the two students like each other.
"The more a student felt unrealistically superior to a specific other student, the less he or she was liked by the other student in return," researchers wrote in a new study in Social Psychological and Personality Science.
For the study, researchers collected data from more than 300 eighth-grade students in schools in southeast Germany. They asked each student to rate their classmates, in terms of their likability and of their feelings of academic superiority (i.e. rating on a scale "'I feel academically superior to him/her''). They then contrasted those ratings with the students' grades in math, physics, German, and English. Importantly, they conducted the analysis at two different social levels: "habitual" -- the way people act in general -- and "relationship" -- the way someone acts around a specific individual.
The differences between these two levels of analysis were stark: Students who tended to have an inflated view of themselves at the habitual level were neither more or less liked by their classmates. However, self-inflation toward specific individuals changed how the students felt about each other.
The findings show that "the specific relationship between individuals matters when it comes to the social consequences of self-enhancement." When a person acts superior to someone else specifically, it can be offensive, whereas if someone has an inflated sense of themselves all the time toward everyone, it feels less personal. Just think of that guy, like Sheldon, you might meet at a party who acts like he's smarter than everyone else, you may feel uncomfortable but not personally offended.
The study helps to explain past inconsistent findings on the topics of self-enhancement.
"Our findings may help to explain previous controversial findings on the interpersonal consequences of self-enhancement in that they reveal different effects at two different levels of analysis," the authors wrote.
