Self-control and self-enhancement: Evidence that trait self-control relates to overclaiming

Claiming knowledge about something that does not exist may reflect self-enhancement motives. Is trait self-control related to overclaiming? We considered two possibilities. One possibility was that trait self-control relates positively to overclaiming, perhaps due to social desirability or self-enhancing motivations to report high self-control. The other possibility was that abstaining from self-enhancement requires a degree of inhibition or self-control, resulting in a negative relationship between trait self-control and overclaiming. We tested the correlation between trait self-control and responses on the Over-Claiming Questionnaire (OCQ) in a large sample of college students (N = 566). The OCQ measures familiarity with real and fake information and yields indices of accuracy (knowledge) and bias (overclaiming). Trait self-control related negatively to OCQ accuracy and positively to OCQ bias. People with higher trait self-control tended to claim knowledge about nonexistent concepts, which suggests that responses to the Trait Self-Control Scale capture an element of self-enhancement tendencies.