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In criminal cases of self-defense and provocation, and civil cases of negligence, culpability is often decided with reference to how a reasonably prudent person (RPP) would have behaved in similar circumstances. The RPP is said to be an objective standard in that it eschews consideration of a defendant's unique background or characteristics. We discuss theory and evidence suggesting that in morally relevant judgments, including those involving negligence, self-defense, and provocation, the tendency to rely on the self—on one's own values and predilections—dominates considerations of the RPP. We consider subjective standards that have been proposed as alternatives to the RPP and review research on this topic. We conclude by considering avenues for future research, particularly addressing conditions in which self-standards of reasonableness are most likely to prevail.

This chapter provides an overview of theory and research on competition pools, namely, salient groups in which social comparisons occur routinely and exert a significant impact on self-evaluations. The authors conceptualize competition pools broadly to include competitions among friends, family, coworkers, teammates, and classmates. After a brief overview of social comparison theory, the authors describe the impact of social comparisons that arise in competition pools. Further, the authors note that effects of social comparisons often occur alongside effects of intrapersonal or temporal comparisons. Next, the authors discuss research on how people evaluate referents who outperform them in competition pools. This research, including work on the genius effect and referent status neglect, suggests that people selectively consider the skill level of the referent in order to maintain a positive self-image. The authors then turn to the distinction between local versus global competition pools. Informed by research on the big-fish-little-pond effect and local dominance, the authors argue that social comparisons are most impactful when made locally, among a few immediate others, as opposed to globally, with larger groups. Finally, the chapter concludes by highlighting broader implications of research on competition pools for social comparison theory as well as directions for future research.

Findings from research on self-enhancement and self-protection are generally understood to provide evidence for “motivated bias.” Despite their ubiquity, the meaning of “motivation,” “bias,” and “motivated bias” are usually left to intuition. In this article, we clarify the meaning of these terms as they apply to constructing and maintaining desired self-views. We argue that preserving psychological homeostasis (i.e., emotional equilibrium) is as important as preserving biological homeostasis, and indeed, that psychological and biological homeostasis are two aspects of one overarching balancing principle. We argue further that, although maintaining a favorable identity can sometimes lead to errors from normative models, the bias toward sustaining psychological homeostasis is just as adaptive as the bias toward sustaining a properly functioning physiology.

This chapter describes the Egocentric Tactician Model. The model purports to account for the influence of the self on social thought. Such thought refers to the social world and those who inhabit it (i.e., characterizing or construing another's actions, predicting others’ preferences or behaviors, evaluating what is normative or right). The model posits that the influence of the self on social thought is contingent on both the content of the self-concept and the motives that work to maintain or increase the positivity of the self-concept. Two primary motives are self-enhancement and self-protection. The model further asserts that during social thought these motives affect, and are affected by, various cognitive processes and structures. Different chapter sections demonstrate that the Egocentric Tactician Model is empirically grounded, has a broad explanatory scope, is generative, and differs from other models in describing how the self affects social thought.

We addressed explanations for why prisoners manifest the Better-Than-Average Effect (perceptions of superiority to the average peer), focusing on three biases: self-enhancing (social as well as temporal) comparisons, denial, and self-serving attributions. We tested the Better-Than-Average Effect in regards to prisoners’ perceptions of their worst trait, and assessed the relationship between the three biases and positive self-evaluations. Prisoners engaged in self-enhancing comparisons, differentiating themselves from other prisoners and their past selves who committed the crime, but also expected self-improvement in the future. Prisoners also demonstrated denial for intentions to commit the crime, planning of it, recidivism, and over-estimation of crime prevalence in the general population. Although prisoners made self-serving attributions by distancing their own character from their criminal behavior and reporting they had experienced more hardship relative to others, they did not attribute the cause of their crime to such hardship. More extensive self-enhancing temporal comparisons and denial predicted more positive self-evaluations of prisoners’ worst trait relative to the average community member. The strength of some of these biases varied with levels of narcissism and psychopathy.

Research has explored the relationship between self-knowledge and self-awareness. Specifically, psychologists see self-awareness as a step on the path toward self-knowledge. Self-knowledge is not a monolithic concept. For instance, the working self-concept is the self that is most relevant and accessible at a given time, while the global self-concept is an enduring, stored version of oneself. Implicit self-views are normally unconscious, whereas explicit self-views are generally conscious. The discrepancy between implicit and explicit self-knowledge sometimes results in inaccurate evaluations of attitudes, thoughts, and feelings. Other types of self-knowledge are context-dependent. Established theories such as social identity theory state that people have distinct self-views in different situations. For example, self-complexity refers to the number of self-aspects a person possesses. Finally, there are also distinctions between accurate (i.e., self-assessment theory) and positive self-knowledge (i.e., self-enhancement theory). Self-assessment theory posits that people are information seekers who desire accurate self-views. On the contrary, self-enhancement theory says that people seek to maintain positive self-views and are averse to negative self-information. Depending on the context and the concerns for self-presentation, individuals have preferences to pursue accurate or enhancing self-information. Increased self-knowledge can manifest in three major ways: via biological, interpersonal, and intrapsychic origins. Biological explanations of the origins of self-knowledge are mostly concerned with genetic expressions and brain activities. Interpersonal paths also help individuals develop self-knowledge. For instance, social comparison facilitates people’s formation of self-views by comparing themselves with similar others. Reflected appraisals increase people’s awareness of their own abilities, qualities, and identities through others’ lens. Intrapsychic self-knowledge can be obtained through self-perception, in which people learn about themselves by observing and analyzing their behaviors in relevant situations. Introspection—focusing on the self—helps people ascertain the reasons behind their feelings and behaviors, which contributes to self-views. However, introspection can sometimes lead to flawed self-knowledge, or result in negative feelings induced by the feelings of inadequacy. Building on introspection, self-awareness provides another avenue for self-knowledge. The capacity to be aware of one’s existence, or reflexive self-consciousness, is a fundamental component of human cognition. Experimentally induced self-awareness has been shown to have positive effects (e.g., greater compliance with internal standards). Sometimes, however, awareness can have aversive consequences (e.g., suicide) because it reveals that one has fallen short of one’s goals. One way to reduce this discomfort is to avoid self-awareness, such as by cognitive deconstruction—an induction of a cognitive state that lacks emotion, a sense of the future, or concentration on the present. Another way to avoid self-awareness is through deindividuation, which is characterized by a temporary loss of personal identity, especially in a large group. Because self-awareness is associated with both life- and death-related thoughts, researchers argue the nature of this awareness is existential.

Researchers have assumed that people judge their own true selves, or their authentic and fundamental nature, to be no better than that of others. This assumption conflicts with self-enhancement perspectives, and with studies on comparative biases in self and social judgment, which assume that people tend to view their characteristics and life prospects more favorably than those of others. The five studies in this article demonstrate that comparative bias operates in self versus other true self comparisons, both with regard to traits (Studies 1–3), and morally relevant behaviors (Studies 4 and 5). Implications for the true and authentic self constructs are discussed.

Research indicates that actors who intentionally bring about harmful consequences are blamed more for their actions than those who do so unintentionally. However, in many instances of harmful behav...

The better-than-average-effect (BTAE) is the tendency for people to perceive their abilities, attributes, and personality traits as superior compared with their average peer. This article offers a comprehensive review of the BTAE and the first quantitative synthesis of the BTAE literature. We define the effect, differentiate it from related phenomena, and describe relevant methodological approaches, theories, and psychological mechanisms. Next, we present a comprehensive meta-analysis of BTAE studies, including data from 124 published articles, 291 independent samples, and more than 950,000 participants. Results indicated that the BTAE is robust across studies (dz = 0.78, 95% CI [0.71, 0.84]), with little evidence of publication bias. Further, moderation tests suggested that the BTAE is larger in the case of personality traits than abilities, positive as opposed to negative dimensions, and in studies that (a) use the direct rather than the indirect method, (b) involve many rather than few dimensions, (c) sample European Americans rather than East-Asians (especially for individualistic traits), and (d) counterbalance self and average peer judgments. Finally, the BTAE is moderately associated with self-esteem (r = .34) and life satisfaction (r = .33). Results from selection model analyses clarify areas of the BTAE literature in which publication bias may be of elevated concern. Discussion highlights theoretical and empirical implications. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Previous research indicates that local comparisons with one or a few people in the immediate environment have a stronger influence on self-evaluations than general comparisons with larger samples. Two studies examined whether this local dominance effect extends to intrinsic motivation. Study 1 suggests that local comparisons have a stronger effect on both self-evaluations and task enjoyment than general comparisons. Study 2 suggests that local comparisons have a stronger effect on intrinsic motivation than general comparisons and that local comparisons have a significant indirect effect on persistence via intrinsic motivation. Altogether, the present findings are among the first to demonstrate the contribution of local social comparisons to intrinsic motivation. We highlight the implications of these findings for social comparison theories.

Local comparisons involve thinking about the self in relation to one or a few people, such as friends, family, neighbors, or coworkers. Conversely, general comparisons involve thinking about the self in relation to larger samples, such as the average person in one’s profession or country. This chapter first describes a program of research that examined the simultaneous effects of local and general comparisons on self-evaluations. Results show that local comparisons often dominate and displace the effects of general comparisons. Next, it discusses potential moderators of this “local dominance effect” including self-enhancement motives, the physical salience of local group members, and collective self-esteem. Finally, the chapter calls for future research that explores the implications of local dominance for motivational and behavioral outcomes as well as mental and physical health.

This chapter discusses two self-evaluation motives, self-enhancement (to pursue, maintain, or augment the positivity of self-views—more so than objective standards would warrant) and self-protection (to avoid, repair, or minimize the negativity of self-views—even at the expense of truthful feedback). Under the self-centrality breeds self-enhancement principle (i.e., self-enhancement and self-protection will be particularly influential in personally important domains), the chapter elaborates on five pillars of the two motives: self-serving bias, better-than-average effect, selective self-memory, socially desirable responding, and overclaiming. The chapter also considers other reasons for why self-enhancement and self-protection are motivated (e.g., fluctuations in motive strength as a function of self-threat and self-affirmation) and rules out nonmotivational explanations (e.g., expectancies, egocentrism, focalism). Self-enhancement and self-protection are worthy of a place in the pantheon of human motivation.

Understanding the causes of human behavior is essential for advancing one’s interests and for coordinating social relations. The scientific study of how people arrive at such understandings or explanations has unfolded in four distinguishable epochs in psychology, each characterized by a different metaphor that researchers have used to represent how people think as they attribute causality and blame to other individuals. The first epoch was guided by an “intuitive scientist” metaphor, which emphasized whether observers perceived behavior to be caused by the unique tendencies of the actor or by common reactions to the requirements of the situation. This metaphor was displaced in the second epoch by an “intuitive lawyer” depiction that focused on the need to hold people responsible for their misdeeds. The third epoch was dominated by theories of counterfactual thinking, which conveyed a “person as reconstructor” approach that emphasized the antecedents and consequences of imagining alternatives to events, especially harmful ones. With the current upsurge in moral psychology, the fourth epoch emphasizes the moral-evaluative aspect of causal judgment, reflected in a “person as moralist” metaphor. By tracing the progression from the person–environment distinction in early attribution theories to present concerns with moral judgment, our goal is to clarify how causal constructs have been used, how they relate to one another, and what unique attributional problems each addresses.

People evaluate themselves more favorably when they outperform a referent (downward comparison) than when they underperform a referent (upward comparison). However, research has yet to examine whether people are sensitive to the status of the referent during social comparison. That is, does defeating a highly skilled referent yield more favorable self-evaluations than defeating an unskilled referent? Does losing to an unskilled referent yield less favorable self-evaluations than losing to a skilled referent? To address these questions, participants learned that they performed better or worse than another person (social comparison) who ranked above average or below average (referent status). Social comparison information had a more pronounced influence on self-evaluations than referent status information. Furthermore, consistent with self-enhancement theories, participants selectively highlighted referent status information when it had favorable implications for the self. These findings demonstrate that people neglect referent status information, leading winners to evaluate themselves favorably even when the competitor is incompetent.

The current studies tested the hypothesis that, despite experiencing high rates of performance failure, athletes maintain positive ability perceptions by basing assessments of their ability on peak, rarely occurring performances rather than on their more typically occurring base rate averages. Findings from two studies support this assertion. Study 1 showed that collegiate baseball players perceived their best-ever hitting performance to better represent their true hitting ability than their worst-ever performance, despite the latter being far more reflective of their objective batting average. Study 2 replicated this effect among college softball players, and demonstrated further that low-performing athletes were the most severely miscalibrated in their ability perceptions. Implications for coaches, trainers, and practitioners committed to helping athletes develop are discussed.

In Thomas Hardy's classic Tess of the D’Urbervilles, the heroine is an utterly blameless woman whose “offense” is to have been raped by a member of the family she has been sent to live with in hope...

Hypocrisy is a multi-faceted concept that has been studied empirically by psychologists and discussed logically by philosophers. In this study, we pose various behavioral scenarios to research participants and ask them to indicate whether the actor in the scenario behaved hypocritically. We assess many of the components that have been considered to be necessary for hypocrisy (e.g., the intent to deceive, self-deception), factors that may or may not be distinguished from hypocrisy (e.g., weakness of will), and factors that may moderate hypocrisy (e.g., the degree of discrepancy between the attitude and behavior, whether the attitude is stated publicly, and the nature and severity of the behavioral consequences). Our findings indicate that lay conceptions of hypocrisy are often at odds with philosophical speculation. We argue that a complete understanding of the criteria for hypocrisy requires consideration of how ordinary people construe the concept. In contrast to some concepts (e.g., physical causation),...

Does awareness of female body ideals affect women's global self-esteem? We measured awareness of ideal standards for beauty via two approaches. As one approach, participants (55 undergraduate women) self-reported their general propensity to be aware of society's thin ideal standard. As a second approach, we measured visual attention orienting to ideal standards; we covertly measured participants' eye movements to peers' purported ideal standards. Self-reported awareness predicted lower baseline self-esteem; this relationship was mediated by internalization of the thin ideal. Awareness as assessed through attention orienting to peers' ideal standards predicted decreases in global self-esteem, above the effects of self-reported awareness, internalization, and actual measures of physical fitness. Implications for awareness of ideal standards and the media's portrayal of the thin ideal are discussed.

Actions that are intended to produce harmful consequences can fail to achieve their desired effects in numerous ways. We refer to action sequences in which harmful intentions are thwarted as deviant causal chains. The culpable control model of blame (CCM) is a useful tool for predicting and explaining the attributions that observers make of the actors whose harmful intentions go awry. In this paper, we describe six types of deviant causal chains; those in which: an actor’s attempt is obviated by the intervention of another person or the environment; the intended effects could not have been produced regardless of the actor’s behavior; other causes diminish the actor’s causal role; the actor brings about foreseen but undesired consequences as a result of pursuing his or her focal goal; the focal action produces a chain of increasingly remote causal events; and the actor derives unforeseen benefits from his or her nefarious actions. A basic assumption of the CCM in these cases is that attributions for the participants’ actions will depend on positive and negative evaluations of their intentions and behaviors. We describe empirical findings that are consistent with this assumption, and predict other findings for causal deviance phenomena that have not yet been investigated empirically.

As I prepare to type at the computer monitor situated in front of me, the television monitor to the right of me is reporting the story of a high-profile, alcoholic baseball player who recently expe...

People generally evaluate their own attributes and abilities more favorably than those of an average peer. The current study explored whether age moderates this better-than-average effect. We asked young (n = 87), middle-aged (n = 75), and older adults (n = 77) to evaluate themselves and an average peer on a variety of trait and ability dimensions. On most dimensions, a better-than-average effect was observed for young, middle-aged, and older adults. However, on dimensions for which older individuals have clear deficiencies (i.e., athleticism, physical attractiveness), a betterthan-average effect was observed for young and middle-aged adults, while a worsethan-average effect was observed for older adults. We argue that egocentrism accounts for these age differences in comparative self-evaluations. jasp_752

The tendency for people to evaluate themselves more favorably than an average-peer--the better-than-average effect (BTAE)--is among the most well-documented effects in the social-psychological literature. The BTAE has been demonstrated in many populations with various methodologies, and several explanations have been advanced for it. Two essential questions remain conspicuously unanswered in the BTAE literature. The first concerns the extent to which the BTAE can be represented as a social-comparative phenomenon, and the second concerns the role that strategic motivational processes play in self versus average-peer judgments. With regard to the first question, Study 1 provides direct experimental evidence that self versus average-peer judgments are made relationally rather than independently and, further, that self-ratings anchor these relational judgments. Moreover, Study 1 demonstrates that the consequence of this comparison is for judgments of average to be assimilated toward, not contrasted from, self-ratings. Studies 2-4 provide evidence that self-enhancement motives play a moderating role in the outcome of self versus average-peer judgments. We show that for dimensions on which the self is positively evaluated, enhancement motives restrict the extent to which average-peer assimilation occurs (Study 2). But for dimensions on which the self is negatively evaluated, enhancement motives amplify average-peer assimilation (Studies 3 and 4). Discussion focuses on the function of such differential assimilation, the relation of the current findings to extant perspectives, and directions for future research.

Blame attributions are influenced by various extralegal factors, although at present there is no compelling evidence to link what may be one of the most pervasive sources of bias in blame judgments—an actor's social attractiveness or likableness—to blame attributions. We conducted 2 studies that varied an actor's social attractiveness and assessed its influence on blame. Social attractiveness influenced blame ratings in both studies, and perceptions of the actor's likableness mediated this effect.

A limitation of most comparative bias studies is that they lack an objective criterion against which to assess the accuracy of self-evaluations. Furthermore, comparisons are usually made with large populations or “average peers” rather than specific others. To assess the robustness of self-enhancement when strong reality constraints are imposed, we created a video dating paradigm in which participants made profiles that they believed would be evaluated by opposite-sex peers. Blocks of seven profiles were created, and participants ranked their own profiles and estimated how others who viewed their videos would rank them (metaperceptions). Each actor was yoked to one observer who saw and ranked the same block of profiles. Despite the presence of an external reality check, participants in all three studies evinced strong self-enhancement tendencies as measured in self-rankings and metaperception judgments that exceeded those provided by observers.

Social and temporal comparisons are two fundamental information sources for evaluating one’s characteristics and abilities. The current study demonstrates that when social comparison (where people’s performance stood in the overall distribution) and temporal comparison (whether performance improved or deteriorated over time) information are both provided, each independently influences actors’ self-evaluations of task performance and ability. In contrast, yoked observer participants paid virtually no attention to temporal comparison information, preferring to evaluate actors based solely on their status relative to others. Furthermore, when the feedback actors received suggested that they were getting worse, their self-evaluation ratings were approximately equal to that of the observers who had access to the same information. However, when their fortunes improved over time, actors used this temporal information as a basis for evaluating themselves more favorably than observers. We argue that both egocentrism and self-enhancement account for the differences between actors’ and observers’ performance evaluations.

Social comparisons entail not only information about one's standing in a social group (intragroup or local comparison) but also information about the standing of the group in comparison to other groups (intergroup or general comparison). In Studies 1-3, the authors explored the relative impact of intergroup and intragroup comparisons on self-evaluations and affect. While intragroup comparison feedback consistently impacted self-evaluations and affect, intergroup comparison information exerted a significant impact only when intragroup comparison information was unavailable. The authors refer to this general tendency as contextual neglect. Studies 4 and 5 showed that contextual neglect is due primarily to the fact that low-level, local comparison information displaces or supersedes the effect of higher level, general comparison data and that people clearly recognize the superior diagnosticity of higher level comparisons while continuing to rely on small, haphazard sample data to evaluate their ability.

Belief perseverance—the tendency to make use of invalidated information—is one of social psychology’s most reliable phenomena. Virtually all of the explanations proffered for the effect, as well as the conditions that delimit it, involve the way people think about or explain the discredited feedback. But it seems reasonable to assume that the importance of the feedback for the actor’s self-image would also influence the tendency to persevere on invalidated feedback. From a self-enhancement perspective, one might ask: Why would people persist in negative self-beliefs, especially when the basis for those beliefs has been discredited? In the present study, actors and observers completed a word-identification task and were given bogus success or failure feedback. After success feedback was discredited, actors and observers persevered equally in beliefs about the actor’s abilities. However, following invalidation of failure feedback, actors provided significantly higher performance evaluations than observers, thus exhibiting less perseverance on the negative feedback. These results suggest that the motivation to maintain a relatively favorable self-image may attenuate perseverance when discredited feedback threatens an important aspect of the self-concept.

In 5 studies, the authors investigated the effects of comparison with an individual versus comparison with the statistical average on self-evaluations of performance and ability. In Studies 1 and 2, participants took a test of lie detection ability and were provided with the average score and the score of an individual coactor. Both types of feedback significantly affected self-evaluations of performance, but only comparison with the coactor significantly affected self-evaluations of ability. Studies 3 and 4 demonstrated that the presence of a coactor moderated the effect of aggregate social comparison on self-evaluations of ability. The results provide preliminary support for the contention that minimizing the impact of comparison with the average is a self-serving strategy that is facilitated by the presence of others.

Participants in three studies were asked to estimate the percentage of times they exhibited polar ends of a trait dimension (e.g., behaved cooperatively or uncooperatively) when the opportunity to display that trait arose, and then to evaluate their standing on the trait based on their behavioral estimates. Approximately 6 weeks later, participants were provided with behavior estimates that purportedly represented the average estimates of their peers and asked to evaluate the average person's standing on the trait dimension. The “better than myself effect” is reflected in the finding that people consistently evaluate themselves more favorably than others, even when the behavioral estimates on which they base their ratings of the average person are the identical estimates they provided for themselves. Study 1 demonstrated the basic “better than myself effect,” and Study 2 showed that participants did not alter their behavior estimates when they learned that the average person's estimates were the same as their own. Study 3 demonstrated the “better than myself” effect in comparisons with a randomly selected peer rather than the average peer. A fourth study, using a different methodology, showed that people who wrote behavior descriptions to represent their standing on a trait dimension, and then read similar trait descriptions from a randomly selected peer, also continued to evaluate themselves more favorably than others, despite basing these evaluations on behavior descriptions that were presumably no more favorable than those provided by others.

The proposition that desires, needs, and goals influence people's thoughts, attitudes, and judgments is endemic to many social psychological theories. Researchers have continually struggled, however, to establish these motivational phenomena vis-a-vis alternative information-processing explanations. This struggle is necessitated by the difficulties that motivational theories have introduced throughout psychology's history. Instinct theories in the 1920s, for example, threatened to discourage investigation into other behavioral antecedents. Drive theories in the 1950s complicated functional behavioral laws and were difficult to confirm empirically. In fact, Skinner was able to forge a behavior theory that was arguably more powerful than those of his contemporaries while dispensing completely with motivational terms. Despite these difficulties, most psychologists, Skinnerians notwithstanding, have found the motivation concept indispensable. As the articles in this symposium demonstrate, motivational concepts are ascendant in social psychology. Social psychologists have deployed the motivation concept primarily to explain people's need to forge, maintain, or recoup positive self-concepts. In addition to self-enhancement and self-protection needs (Dunning, this issue), the authors in this symposium discuss the need to maintain favorable views of one's peers (Kunda & Sinclair, this issue) or relationship partners (Murray, this issue). Ultimately, these needs also subserve self-enhancement in that the desire to view close others positively accrues self-benefits. Having convincingly surmounted alternative explanations of motivational phenomena, researchers have begun to address the conditions in which different motives prevail. Sedikides and Strube (1995), for example, considered the circumstances under which four self-related motives-self-enhancement, self-verification, self-assessment, and self-improvement-are most likely to be activated. They assume, for example, that self-assessment needs predominate with highly diagnostic tasks, whereas self-enhancement prevails with ambiguous tasks. Presumably, diagnostic tasks enable accurate assessment of abilities and characteristics, whereas ambiguous tasks provide the latitude to define one's characteristics self-servingly. In addition to coordinating motives with situations, researchers have examined how different motives influence the kinds of information people seek. Taylor, Neter, and Wayment (1995), for example, showed that people seeking self-improvement tend to compare themselves with superior others, whereas those seeking self-enhancement prefer inferior comparison targets. In this article, I outline an expanded view of self-related motives couched in terms of six self-orientations. Self-orientations are evoked by challenges to the self s integrity or opportunities for self-advancement. The self-orientation perspective assumes that internal processes, such as thinking about one's behavior, characteristics, or circumstances, or external events, such as social or task feedback, evoke cognitive and emotional states that favor, but do not dictate, particular motivated strategies. A person who receives unfavorable social feedback, for example, may become sad, angry, or energized, leading to exceptional openness (e.g., self-evaluation or self-improvement motives) or defensiveness (e.g., self-verification or self-enhancement motives) in self-evaluations and social judgments. Whether a person favors relatively biased or unbiased selfand social judgments depends on the strength of the orientation, the type of information that is available to assess self and others, and personality factors. A single person may enter into different self-orientations within a relatively short time frame, and people vary in their chronic tendencies to occupy each self-orientation. The six basic self-orientations are the habitual self, the beleaguered self, the exalted self, the analytic self, the malleable self, and the existential self. The habitual self refers to people's usual selfand social judgment tendencies, whereas the other five orientations represent special self-threats or opportunities. In terms of the self-orientation approach, Kunda and Sinclair's target article in this issue describes circumstances in

Introduction. Chapter 1: Self as Source and Constraint of Social Knowledge, Joachim I. Krueger, Mark D. Alicke, & David A. Dunning. Part I: Social Projection. Chapter 2: Social Projection and the Psychology of Choice, Joachim I. Krueger & Melissa Acevedo. Chapter 3: Cross-Situational Projection, Leaf Van Boven & George Loewenstein. Part II. Self-Enhancement. Chapter 4: Shallow Thoughts about the Self: The Automatic Components of Self-Assessment, Thomas Gilovich, Nicholas Epley, & Karlene Hanko. Chapter 5: The Better-Than-Average Effect, Mark D. Alicke & Olesya Govorun. Part III. Self and Others Compared. Chapter 6: The Knife that Cuts Both Ways: Comparison Processes in Social Perception, Thomas Mussweiler, Kai Epstude, & Katja Ruter. Chapter 7: A Feature-Based Model of Self-Other Comparisons, Sara D. Hodges. Chapter 8: Self-Other Asymmetries in Behavior Explanations: Myth and Reality, Bertram F. Malle. Part IV: Integrative Approaches. Chapter 9: Judging for Two: Some Connectionist Proposals for How the Self Informs and Constrains Social Judgment, Emily Balcetis & David Dunning. Chapter 10: A Hierarchy Within: On the Motivational and Emotional Primacy of the Individual Self, Lowell Gaertner & Constantine Sedikides. Chapter 11: The Ingroup as Part of the Self: Reconsidering the Link between Social Categorization, Ingroup Favoritism and the Self-Concept, Sabine Otten. Conclusion. Chapter 12: The Self in Social Perception: Looking Back, Looking Ahead, David A. Dunning, Joachim I. Krueger, & Mark D. Alicke

Research on the conditions under which dispositional generalizations are mitigated has been primarily conducted within two experimental paradigms: the attitude attribution and questioner-contestant paradigms. In these situations, a target's behavior is constrained by random assignment. Despite learning that targets were randomly assigned to express predetermined views or enact social roles, participants continue to ascribe attitudes consistent with the position targets advocated or the role they enacted. This finding, which has been frequently replicated, has been called correspondence bias or the fundamental attribution error. To date, many of the factors that might be expected to moderate this bias, such as participants' personal attitudes, or the strength of the constraint, have been surprisingly ineffective. The ineffectiveness of these factors may be due in part to the relatively small effect sizes obtained with the constraint of random assignment. Our studies examined the influence of personal attit...

The relative preference effect refers to the tendency for people with incompatible ethical views to differ in their evaluations of targets whose ethical decisions agree versus disagree with their own. For example, people who say they would keep a lost wallet ascribe less blame to a target who does the same than do people who say they would return the wallet. The relative preference effect does not require that people consider their ethical choices to be morally superior to the alternatives: The effect occurs even when people who endorse less ethically desirable alternatives (such as keeping a lost wallet) admit that the opposite alternative (such as returning the wallet) is more admirable or desirable, and also when they admit that they would teach their children to do the opposite. The two studies in this paper examined different explanations for the pervasiveness of the relative preference effect. Study 1 assessed the possibility that people evaluate targets who agree with them more favorably because they assume the targets' decisions will produce positive outcomes. Study 1 provided evidence against this interpretation by showing that the relative preference effect occurred when the target's decision produced negative as well as positive outcomes. Study 2 assessed the possibility that people evaluate agreeing others more favorably because they assume most people share their ethical preferences. This explanation was supported by a significant interaction between consensus information and agreement–disagreement information on blame attributions: The relative preference effect occurred when participants were provided with information indicating most of their peers agreed with their ethical decision, but not when they believed a majority of their peers disagreed.

Social self-analysis is the process by which people use comparison information to define and modify their self-concepts or identity images. Self-concepts are beliefs about one’s abilities, attitudes, emotions, and behavior tendencies that range from relatively concrete to abstract in a self-knowledge hierarchy. Comparison information includes contrasting one’s own task and social feedback with others’ or with past and future states of one’s own or others’. We use an analogy with psychometric test theory to highlight the features of social self-analysis and view these comparisons as comparison tests that people encounter or conduct to assess their self-concepts. Comparison test feedback is assessed for its reliability, validity, and generalizability and is abstracted to low- to high-level self-concepts. Accurate translation from comparison test feedback to self-concepts is hindered by the absence of adequate comparison samples, the tendency to eschew large-scale comparison data for local comparisons (what we call “local dominance”), and by the desire to construct and maintain favorable identity images.

Laboratory research on rape has examined how the context of the offense and characteristics of the victim influence responsibility ascriptions. The present research examined the influence of the perpetrator's personality on such attributions. This study distinguished between evaluative (general likability) and descriptive (aggressiveness) components of the perpetrator's personality and assessed the effect of each on subjects' confidence of the perpetrator's guilt or innocence for an alleged acquaintance rape. Results showed that subjects were more confident in the defendant's guilt when he was described by cohorts as generally dislikable versus likable, and as aggressive versus unaggressive. Assessments of academic punishment and legal responsibility generally paralleled these findings. Females were more confident in the defendant's guilt, and this was particularly true when the defendant was described as aggressive.

Research in which people compare themselves with an average peer has consistently shown that people evaluate themselves more favorably than they evaluate others. Seven studies were conducted to demonstrate that the magnitude of this better-than-average effect depends on the level of abstraction in the comparison. These studies showed that people were less biased when they compared themselves with an individuated target than when they compared themselves with a nonindividuated target, namely, the average college student. The better-than-average effect was reduced more when the observer had personal contact with the comparison target than when no personal contact was established. Differences in the magnitude of the better-than-average effect could not be attributed to the contemporaneous nature of the target's presentation, communication from the target, perceptual vividness, implied evaluation, or perceptions of similarity

The "false consensus effect" refers to the tendency to overestimate consensus for one′s attitudes and behaviors. This overestimation may occur because people are biased in viewing their own positions as normative, or simply because they over generalize from case information, with their own positions representing one salient item of case information. Four studies were conducted to demonstrate that people overestimate concensus for their own performance outcomes and to show that this overestimation occurs independently of the influence of case information about the performance of others. Subjects in each study received either personal information about their success or failure on a bogus test of social sensitivity or case information about the success or failure of others. Control subjects received no performance feedback. The results of each study showed that subjects overestimated, on the basis of their own performance outcome, the number of their peers who would succeed or fail at the task, but did not overestimate on the basis of case information alone. These findings support the assumption that has guided research on the false consensus effect, namely, that people are biased in perceiving their own attitudes, behaviors, and outcomes as normative. These findings also show that the false consensus effect is not simply a product of the overgeneralization from case information.

Local comparisons with a few people displace the influence of general comparisons with many people during self-evaluation of performance and ability. The current research examined whether this local dominance effect obtains in the domain of health risk perception, an outcome of critical importance given its direct relation to preventative health behaviours. Participants received manipulated feedback indicating that their risk of diabetes (Study 1) or a serious car accident (Study 2) ranked above average or below average relative to numerous peers. Additionally, some participants were told that their risk ranked highest or lowest relative to a few peers. Participants evaluated their risk as significantly higher when they only knew that it ranked above average than below average. However, this effect was eliminated among participants who received additional local comparison information. These findings highlight the potential biasing influence of local comparison on everyday health judgment and behaviour.

People desire to maximize the positivity, and minimize the negativity, of their self-views. The tendency to exalt one's virtues and soften one's weaknesses, relative to objective criteria, manifests itself in many domains of human striving. We focus illustratively on three strivings: the self-serving bias (crediting the self for successes but blaming others or situations for failures), the better-than-average effect (considering the self superior to the average peer), and selective self-memory (disproportionately poor recall for negative self-relevant information). Nonmotivational factors (e.g., expectations, egocentrism, focalism, individuated-entity versus aggregate comparisons) are not necessary for the emergence of these strivings. Instead, the strivings are (at least partially) driven by the self-enhancement and self-protection motives, as research on self-threat and self-affirmation has established. The two motives serve vital functions: They confer benefits to psychological health and psychological interests (e.g., goal pursuit).

Rational decision theories and philosophical theories of moral responsibility stipulate that ascriptions of blame for harmdoing should be based on a priori sources of culpability (e.g., intention, motive, foresight, negligence) rather than on a posteriori outcomes that occur subsequent to an actor's behavioral involvement. The five studies reported in this paper demonstrated, however, that a posteriori outcome information strongly affects both ascriptions of blame and decision quality. Furthermore, these studies supported a revisionist model of a posteriori influence whereby outcome information leads observers to revise their estimations of the actor's a priori culpability. Studies 4 and 5 elaborated this model by demonstrating that a posteriori revision of a priori decision criteria serves to justify people's blame attributions.

Two studies examined the effect of enacting a social role on perceptions of a partner in a simulated interaction. Subjects were led to believe they were interacting with a partner whom they saw on a TV monitor (which actually showed a videotaped recording). Subjects evaluated the introversion/extraversion of their 'interaction partner. " Those instructed to enact an introvert role saw the partner as more extraverted than those who enacted an extravert role. Study 2 showed that, compared with a control group that did not enact a role, extraverts saw the person as more introverted (though not statistically significantly so), whereas introverts saw the person as more extraverted. Neither study found an effect of subjects' actual personality classification as introverts or extraverts. These findings have implications for the relative importance of temporary and chronic construct activation in social perception.

The local dominance effect is the tendency for comparisons with a few, discrete individuals to have a greater influence on self-assessments than comparisons with larger aggregates. This review presents a series of recent studies that demonstrate the local dominance effect. The authors offer two primary explanations for the effect and consider alternatives including social categorization and the abstract versus concrete nature of local versus general comparisons. They then discuss moderators of the effect including physical proximity and self-enhancement. Finally, the theoretical and practical implications of the effect are discussed and potential future directions in this research line are proposed.

Zell and Alicke (2009) have shown that comparisons with a few people have a stronger influence on self-evaluations than comparisons with larger samples. One explanation for this effect is that people readily categorize their standing in small groups as “good” or “bad,” which supersedes large-sample data. To test this explanation, we created a situation in which students learned that their performance ranked 5th or 6th out of 10 persons on a task. In each experimental session, two groups, each containing 5 people, were created by random assignment. Some students learned that their performance placed them last in one group of 5, and some learned that they were first in the other group of 5. In the other conditions, participants learned only that that they were 5th or 6th in the group of 10. Results showed that being last in the superior group led to lower self-evaluations than being first in the inferior group.

Social comparison information fluctuates over time. We examined how people evaluate their task performance and ability after receiving test feedback specifying not only that they ranked above or below average, but also that their social status was rising, falling, or remaining constant. Participants' self-evaluations were more positive when their social standing was rising over time rather than remaining constant. On the other hand, participants whose status was falling did not evaluate themselves less favorably than those with a constant position in the performance distribution. These reactions to performance feedback were observed on self-evaluations of ability, but not on more even-handed assessments of performance. Implications for social comparison and self-evaluation maintenance theories are discussed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.