Evidence for egocentric comparison in social judgment

People often disagree in their judgments of the traits and the abilities of others. Three studies suggested that these differences arise because people activate and use their own particular behaviors as norms when evaluating the performances of others. In Study 1, 71% of participants reported comparing a target's behavior with their own behavior when providing judgments of that target. Participants also provided descriptions of their own behavior more quickly afterjudging another person's behavior, suggesting they had activated information about their own behavior when judging that of another (Studies 2 and 3). In all 3 studies, judgments of another's behavior tended to be egocentrically related to the participants' own behavior, particularly among those who displayed the strongest evidence of activation of self-information (Studies 1 and 2). Discussion centers on the generality of these findings and their implications for past and future research.

[1]  Serena Chen,et al.  Transference in social perception: the role of chronic accessibility in significant-other representations. , 1995, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[2]  D. Dunning,et al.  A New Look at Motivated Inference: Are Self-Serving Theories of Success a Product of Motivational Forces? , 1995 .

[3]  D. Dunning,et al.  Idiosyncratic trait definitions: implications for self-description and social judgment. , 1995, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[4]  M. Biernat,et al.  Shifting standards and stereotype-based judgments. , 1994, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[5]  D. Dunning.  Words to live by: The self and definitions of social concepts and categories. , 1993 .

[6]  S. Fiske.  Social cognition and social perception. , 1993, Annual review of psychology.

[7]  Eliot R. Smith,et al.  Exemplar-Based Model of Social Judgment , 1992 .

[8]  David Dunning,et al.  Egocentric Definitions of Traits and Abilities in Social Judgment , 1992 .

[9]  D. Dunning,et al.  Self-serving prototypes of social categories. , 1991, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[10]  A J Lambert,et al.  The self and social judgment: effects of affective reaction and "own position" on judgments of unambiguous and ambiguous information about others. , 1991, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[11]  Thomas E. Nelson,et al.  Stereotypes and Standards of Judgment , 1991 .

[12]  S. Cole,et al.  "Do I know you?" The role of significant others in general social perception. , 1990, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[13]  R. Klatzky,et al.  Traits and social stereotypes : efficiency differences in social information processing , 1990 .

[14]  C. Judd,et al.  Measures and models of perceived group variability , 1990 .

[15]  Deborah A. Prentice,et al.  Familiarity and differences in self- and other-representations. , 1990, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[16]  D. Dunning,et al.  Ambiguity and self-evaluation: the role of idiosyncratic trait definitions in self-serving assessments of ability , 1989 .

[17]  E. Tory Higgins,et al.  Knowledge accessibility and activation: Subjectivity and suffering from unconscious sources. , 1989 .

[18]  S. Carpenter.  Self-relevance and goal-directed processing in the recall and weighting of information about others , 1988 .

[19]  C. Stangor,et al.  A "change-of-standard" perspective on the relations among context, judgment, and memory. , 1988, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[20]  Norman Miller,et al.  Ten years of research on the false-consensus effect: an empirical and theoretical review , 1987 .

[21]  J. Richard Eiser,et al.  Social psychology: Attitudes, attraction and influence , 1986 .

[22]  Dale T. Miller,et al.  Norm theory: Comparing reality to its alternatives , 1986 .

[23]  D. A. Kenny,et al.  The moderator-mediator variable distinction in social psychological research: conceptual, strategic, and statistical considerations. , 1986, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[24]  R. Moreland,et al.  Role of the self-concept in the perception of others. , 1985 .

[25]  M. Strube.  Combining and comparing significance levels from nonindependent hypothesis tests. , 1985 .

[26]  P. Lewicki.  Self-schema and social information processing. , 1984 .

[27]  Steven J. Sherman,et al.  The role of the evaluation and similarity principles in the false consensus effect , 1984 .

[28]  J. Eiser,et al.  Accentuation theory, polarization and the judgment of attitude statements , 1984 .

[29]  E. Tory Higgins,et al.  Context, categorization, and recall: The “change-of-standard” effect , 1983, Cognitive Psychology.

[30]  Pawel Lewicki,et al.  Self-image bias in person perception. , 1983 .

[31]  K. Holyoak,et al.  Social reference points , 1983 .

[32]  H. Markus,et al.  Self-Schemas and Judgments about Others , 1982 .

[33]  A. Greenwald,et al.  Psychological perspectives on the self , 1982 .

[34]  C. I. Hovland,et al.  Social Judgment: Assimilation and Contrast Effects in Communication and Attitude Change , 1981 .

[35]  T. K. Srull,et al.  Category accessibility and social perception: Some implications for the study of person memory and interpersonal judgments , 1980 .

[36]  K. A. Ericsson,et al.  Verbal reports as data. , 1980 .

[37]  J. Harackiewicz,et al.  Contrast effects in attitude judgment: An examination of the accentuation hypothesis. , 1980 .

[38]  T. K. Srull,et al.  The Role of Category Accessibility in the Interpretation of Information About Persons: Some Determinants and Implications , 1979 .

[39]  Denise B. Kandel,et al.  Similarity in Real-Life Adolescent Friendship Pairs. , 1978 .

[40]  J. Eiser,et al.  Judgmental perspective and value connotations of response scale labels. , 1978 .

[41]  L. Ross,et al.  The “false consensus effect”: An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes , 1977 .

[42]  Timothy D. Wilson,et al.  Telling more than we can know: Verbal reports on mental processes. , 1977 .

[43]  W. S. Rholes,et al.  Category accessibility and impression formation , 1977 .

[44]  M. Scheier,et al.  Public and private self-consciousness: Assessment and theory. , 1975 .

[45]  J. Eiser,et al.  Categorization and congruity in attitudinal judgment. , 1975 .

[46]  J. S. Shrauger,et al.  Self-evaluation and the selection of dimensions for evaluating others. , 1974, Journal of personality.

[47]  Jacob Beck,et al.  Adaptation-level theory. , 1974 .

[48]  J. Eiser,et al.  Evaluative consistency and social judgment. , 1974 .

[49]  N. Warren,et al.  Salience, centrality and self-relevance of traits in construing others. , 1974 .

[50]  W. Stroebe,et al.  Categorization and social judgement , 1972 .

[51]  H. Upshaw.  The Personal Reference Scale: An Approach to Social Judgment1 , 1969 .

[52]  H. Kelley.  Attribution theory in social psychology , 1967 .

[53]  C. D. Ward.  EGO INVOLVEMENT AND THE ABSOLUTE JUDGMENT OF ATTITUDE STATEMENTS. , 1965, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[54]  H. Helson,et al.  Adaptation-level theory , 1964 .

[55]  H. Tajfel,et al.  Classification and quantitative judgement. , 1963, British journal of psychology.

[56]  J. M. Kittross.  The measurement of meaning , 1959 .

[57]  H. Tajfel.  Value and the perceptual judgment of magnitude. , 1957, Psychological review.

[58]  Theodore M. Newcomb,et al.  The prediction of interpersonal attraction , 1956 .

[59]  C I HOVLAND,et al.  Judgmental phenomena and scales of attitude measurement, item displacement in Thurstone scales. , 1952, Journal of abnormal psychology.