Reflections on the Self-Fulfilling Effects of Positive Illusions

Abstract

It is often joked that psychologists choose to study what they lack personally; we're relieved to say that this did not hold true for us. We are an optimistic group and started with the hunch that cold-eyed reality may not be the best thing for romantic relationships. Anecdotally, we had all been struck by people's capacity to see a dating partner's jealousy as caring, or a spouse's stubbornness as strength. On the more personal side, we were all relieved by our respective spouse's ability to tolerate our faults. On a more academic front, we had also been captivated by Brickman's (1987) writings on the sources of meaning in life and by Taylor and Brown's (1988) thoughts about the adaptive nature of hopeful distortions. Basically, Brickman (1987) argued that the experience of commitment, meaning, and value comes from people's basic motivation to reconcile the more negative with the more positive side of their experiences. In fact, he went so far as to argue that people would find little sense of meaning or value in the pursuit of unconflicted goals. Instead, from Brickman's perspective, it is precisely because of the negative aspects of our choices and endeavors that we come to see the positive value and meaning in our lives. From his perspective, we love our partners not in spite of their negative qualities-but because of these very attributes. Captivated as we were by this general theme, we were also left unconvinced by some aspects of this reasoning. For instance, Brickman (1987) believed that people rationalize their partner's faults by embellishing or exaggerating their virtues. According to this bank account model (e.g., Gottman, 1998), faults are simply overshadowed or masked by the positive rather than being somehow transformed. As a result, Brickman pointed to the perils of such idealization processes, arguing that such constructions are inherently fragile, turning love into hate when they are undone. Moreover, such pessimism about the disappointments likely to befall intimates who idealized one another echoed most popular and even psychological conceptions of love. People are invariably cautioned not to idealize one another-and instead, to strive for a realistic understanding of one another's actual qualities (see Brehm, 1988, for a review). In fact, Swann, Hixon, and De La Ronde (1992) had recently reported that people experienced less emotional intimacy in their marriage when their spouse saw them more positively than they saw themselves. In debating these ideas, we could not escape our sense that people could develop generous, idealized images of their partner without necessarily denying or masking their partner's faults. For instance, seeing a partner's stubbornness as integrity involves shifting one's construal of the behavior, not denying it. Holmes' prior work on trust also had suggested that trusting spouses organize their beliefs and expectations about their relationships in ways that link negative thoughts and memories to more positive ones (Holmes & Rempel, 1989). More generally, the zeitgeist of the University of Waterloo social psychology program emphasized the construction of social reality, and how this construction was often in the service of goals and motives. Hallways were full of discussions of social construal processes, and the flexible and creative nature of social perception (Griffin & Ross, 1991; Kunda, 1990). After all, Kunda's theory of motivated reasoning, Zanna's historical roots in dissonance (Zanna & Cooper, 1974), recent writings on commitment and adversity (Lydon & Zanna, 1990), and Ross's (1989) research on the construction of personal histories all share the common sentiment that people's goals and expectations shape how they construct and perceive their worlds. Consistent with such social constructionist leanings, Taylor (1983) argued that female patients with cancer satisfy overarching motives for self-esteem, meaning, and mastery by selectively engaging in social comparisons and by flexibly accommodating their theories about the causes of their cancer to present circumstances. In much the same way, we believed that