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Understanding how healthfully people think they eat compared to others has implications for their motivation to engage in dietary change and the adoption of health recommendations. Our goal was to investigate the scope, sources, and measurements of bias in comparative food consumption beliefs. Across 4 experiments, participants made direct comparisons of how their consumption compared to their peers' consumption and/or estimated their personal consumption of various foods/nutrients and the consumption by peers, allowing the measurement of indirect comparisons. Critically, the healthiness and commonness of the foods varied. When the commonness and healthiness of foods both varied, indirect comparative estimates were more affected by the healthiness of the food, suggesting a role for self-serving motivations, while direct comparisons were more affected by the commonness of the food, suggesting egocentrism as a nonmotivated source of comparative bias. When commonness did not vary, the healthiness of the foods impacted both direct and indirect comparisons, with a greater influence on indirect comparisons. These results suggest that both motivated and nonmotivated sources of bias should be taken into account when creating interventions aimed at improving eating habits and highlights the need for researchers to be sensitive to how they measure perceptions of comparative eating habits. (PsycINFO Database Record

Older adults are frequently the targets of scams and deception, with millions of individuals being affected each year in the United States alone. Previous research has shown that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex may play a role in vulnerability to fraud. The current study examined brain activation patterns in relation to susceptibility to scams and fraud using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Twenty-eight healthy, community-dwelling older adults were subdivided into groups of impaired and unimpaired decision makers as determined by their performance on the Iowa Gambling Task. While in the scanner, the participants viewed advertisements that were created directly from cases deemed deceptive by the Federal Trade Commission. We then obtained behavioral measures involving comprehension of claims and purchase intentions of the product in each advertisement. Contrasts show brain activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex was less correlated with purchase intention in impaired versus unimpaired older adult decision makers. Our results have important implications for both future research and recognizing the possible causes of fraud susceptibility among older adults.

In six experiments, we tested four explanations for the better/worse-than-average effect (B/WTA) by manipulating the number of items comprising the target or referent of direct comparison. A single-item target tended to be rated more extremely than a single-item or a multi-item referent (Experiments 1–3). No B/WTA was obtained, however, when a multi-item target was compared with either a single- or multi-item referent (Experiments 4 and 5). A bias favoring a multi-item target was found only if cohesiveness among the items was increased through instructions (Experiment 6). The Unique-Attributes Hypothesis generally provided the best explanation the findings; the focalism explanation also demonstrated some empirical viability. The results suggest that important preferential decision-making outcomes can be affected by both the number of items and whether items are strategically manipulated to serve as targets or referents of comparison.