Abstract

One does not know enough that one knows too little. Mental illnesses have been prevalent today as much of the world's population has been susceptible to them. To respond to this threat, psychology aims to establish a better understanding of society by naming psychological phenomena relevant to people's mental health. Three of these phenomena include self-efficacy, social anxiety, and illusory superiority. Illusory superiority, the mentality that one is above average, has been viral as people have high tendencies in exhibiting it. Moreover, on a constricted view particularly in schools, students face academic responsibilities from time to time; thus, the need for their academic self-efficacy or their belief in being able to accomplish academically. However, social anxiety cripples academic self-efficacy. This qualitative grounded theory aims to identify and verify the influence of illusory superiority on the relationship between students' academic self-efficacy and their social anxiety in classroom participation. Among the three mentioned variables, there is a well-established relationship between the two but there have been no formal studies that have identified and verified the relationship involving all three variables. Having self-efficacy and social anxiety as variables with an indirect relationship, the researchers try to identify illusory superiority's influence on the said inverse relationship through a constant comparative method to analyze the responses of the student participants. Since the study is a grounded theory design, the participants are selected based on the indicators of each variable that will be suitable for the study. Through these one-on-one interviews, it was verified that students' self-efficacy and social anxiety are inverse constructs. This implies that students who can communicate well with their peers and students who participate in class believe more in themselves. Lastly, it was theorized that illusory superiority is a pillar that supports the indirect relationship between self-efficacy and social anxiety.