Resumen de Openness to (reporting) experiences that one never had:: Overclaiming as an outcome of the knowledge accumulated through a proclivity for cognitive and aesthetic exploration.
Patrick D. Dunlop, Joshua S. Bourdage, Reinout E. de Vries, Benjamin E. Hilbig, Ingo Zettler, Steven G. Ludeke
Overclaiming—in which individuals overstate their level of familiarity with items—has been proposed as a potential indicator of positive self-presentation. However, the precise nature and determinants of overclaiming are not well understood. Herein, we provide novel insights into overclaiming through 4 primary studies (comprising 6 samples) and a meta-analysis. Based on past empirical work and theoretical discussions suggesting that overclaiming may be the result of several processes—including an egoistic tendency to self-enhance, intentional impression managing behavior, and memory biases—we investigate various potential dispositional bases of this behavior. We hypothesized that overclaiming would best be predicted by a dispositional tendency to be curious and explorative (i.e., high Openness to Experience) and by a dispositional tendency to be disingenuous and self-centered (i.e., low Honesty-Humility). All studies provided support for the first hypothesis; that is, overclaiming was positively associated with Openness. However, no study supported the hypothesis that overclaiming was associated with Honesty-Humility. The third and fourth studies, where multiple mechanisms were compared simultaneously, further revealed that overclaiming can be understood as a result of knowledge accumulated through a general proclivity for cognitive and aesthetic exploration (i.e., Openness) and, to a lesser extent, time spent in formal education. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2017 APA, all rights reserved)
