David A. Armor



Assistant Professor (Ph.D., 1998, University of California, Los Angeles)

 
 

I am interested in the processes of self-evaluation, social judgment, and decision-making. Most of my current research focuses on understanding the causes and consequences of bias in self-evaluation, and I have been particularly interested in how people maintain a working balance between what they want to believe about themselves and evidence that may or may not support these beliefs.

One of the most robust and reliable findings in the psychology of prediction is that people's predictions tend to be unrealistically optimistic. The apparent prevalence of such flagrant optimism, however, raises an intriguing dilemma: Because unrealistic optimism is, by definition, prone to disconfirmation, its maintenance would stand in violation of the law of effect. My research examines how people maintain unrealistically optimistic expectations without suffering from what would seem to be inevitable disappointment. Current work capitalizes on the malleability of optimistic expectations as a means for studying their effects on behavior, the interpretation of outcomes, and self-evaluation.

I have also been interested in what I have been calling an "illusion of objectivity" -- an ironic tendency for people to overestimate the extent to which their own judgments are free from biases that they recognize in the judgments of other people. Here I am interested in the specific ways in which this illusion is expressed and the types of situations that augment or diminish its expression. I have also been examining the consequences that illusions of objectivity may have for people who maintain them.

Armor, D. A., & Taylor, S. E. (1998). Situated optimism: Specific outcome expectations and self-regulation. In M. P. Zanna (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 30, pp. 309- 379). New York: Academic Press. 
 
Taylor, S. E., & Armor, D. A. (1996). Positive illusions and coping with adversity. Journal of Personality, 64, 873-898.