Fatima Ismail Professor Duggins Psychology 1101 23 April 2012 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology Helzer and

Dunning examine the influences peers have on a persons personality and their social psychological state. Peers have a major factor in both our future achievement and our behaviors we display currently and later on in life. The choices people make today are very often based on their expectations of success tomorrow (Helzer and Dunning Paragraph 2). The authors arise whether self prediction is more significant and superior than the predictions of peers. Selfpredictions are superior when behavior is internal or isolated. When peer-predictions are superior because we are constantly surrounded by people in school, or at work peer-prediction becomes more significant. We become more cautious of our actions when we are around others. In Study 1, participants predicted each others performance. Each participant has a choice to choose what information was given to the participants who were predicting them. They must choose between past performances in the class or future performances in the class. Helzer and Dunning examine if the participant will give their prediction based off the prediction the participant wanted or the information presented to them. Participants also valued target score for self-prediction more than they did for peer prediction (Helzer and Dunning Paragraph 30). In the second study, participants had to predict the outcome of a students psychology test. The participants are given full information about the students past just like in study 1 and predicted the outcome. In this study peer predictions proved to be equally correlated with future performance. The final study uses the cup stacking game which increased self prediction. They were reminded of their past performance and their target range for the next round. When given the target range there is more self prediction

to get to that range than a concern of predicting the other participants performance like in the other two studies. Study 1 and Study 3 also reveals that peers predicting from target score information made more optimistic predictions overall than did those working with data about past behavior. Replicating Study 2, participants showed more optimism in self-prediction than in peer prediction, even when working from the same information (Helzer and Dunning Paragraph 70). I think peer prediction does have a great influence on our performance. Even though we try to self predict I believe we unconsciously perform to how others predict. No matter how much we try to be more self-predicting about our behaviors, when someone elses opinion is placed in our mind it is hard to forget that prediction and focus on our own.