title: Myopic social prediction and the solo comparison effect.
abstract: Four experiments explored the psychological processes by which people make comparative social judgments. Each participant chose how much money to wager on beating an opponent on either a difficult or a simple trivia quiz. Quiz difficulty did not influence the average person's probability of winning, yet participants bet more on a simple quiz than on a difficult quiz in the first 3 experiments. The results suggest that this effect results from a tendency to attend more closely to a focal actor than to others. Experiment 4 directly manipulated focusing; when participants were led to focus on the opponent instead of themselves, the effect was reversed. The discussion relates the results to other literatures including overly optimistic self-evaluation, false consensus, overconfidence, and social comparison.
authors.affiliation: Graduate School of Industrial Administration, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA. don.moore@alumni.carleton.edu
authors.forename: Don A
authors.initials: DA
authors.lastname: Moore
authors.forename: Tai Gyu
authors.initials: TG
authors.lastname: Kim
mesh_terms: D000293:Adolescent; D000328:Adult; D003674:Defense Mechanisms; D005260:Female; D005715:Gambling / Q000523:psychology; D006801:Humans; D007206:Individuality; D007389:Internal-External Control; D008297:Male; D011337:Probability Learning; D011385:Projection; D012649:Self Concept; D012925:Social Conformity; D012933:Social Identification; D012938:Social Perception