Reference Groups and Self-Appraisals of Academic Ability and Performance

Abstract

We argue that reference groups have three types of influence on self-appraisals: (1) individuals acquire similar self-appraisals as others in their group because of normative processes; (2) individuals who are members of more successful groups develop less favorable self-appraisals because of comparison processes; (3) individuals who are members of more successful groups develop more favorable self-appraisals because group performance reflects on individuals associated with the group. These processes are disentangled to some extent in a contextual analysis of survey data from a national sample of high school males. The key finding is a positive effect of self-appraisals of schoolmates on students' self-appraisals of academic ability and performance. The results suggest that there is a normative factor in how favorably individuals evaluate themselves.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 56 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.