Past research suggests that people believe that they perform socially desirable behaviors more frequently and socially undesirable behaviors less frequently than others (Goethals, 1986;Messick, Bloom, Boldizar, & Samuelson, 1985). The present research examined whether this perception also characterizes people's thinking about intelligent and unintelligent behaviors. In Study 1 , subjects wrote lists of behaviors that they or others did. Subjects indicated that they performed more good and intelligent behaviors and fewer bad and unintelligent behaviors than others, although the magnitude of these differences was greater for good and bad acts than for intelligent and unintelligent ones. In Study 2, a different group of subjects judged the frequency with which the behaviors generated in the first study occur. While self-ascribed good behaviors were rated as occurring more frequently than the good acts of others, self-ascribed intelligent behaviors were not judged as more frequent than the intelligent acts of others. Study 3 replicated this effect using a different methodology, finding that subjects indicated they would be more likely than their peers to perform moral behaviors, but no more likely to perform intellectual behaviors. A theoretical framework is proposed in which people's positive beliefs about themselves are constrained by the publicity, specificity, and objectivity of the dimensions on which these beliefs are held.

Four experiments supported the hypothesis that people see themselves as having rich, multifaceted, and adaptive personalities that result in the perceptions that they possess more traits than other people and are less predictable than other people. Experiment 1 showed that people perceived themselves as having more of opposing pairs of traits than they perceived others as having when they rated both self and an acquaintance on each trait in the pair separately, (e.g., serious and carefree). When the ratings were made on bipolar scales (e.g., serious vs. carefree), the self was rated as closer to the midpoint than was the acquaintance. Experiment 2 showed that the latter result reflects people's belief that they possess both traits in opposing pairs. Subjects in Experiment 2 also rated their behavior as less predictable than that of others. Experiment 3 replicated Experiment 2 and showed that people perceive that they have both members of pairs of opposing traits independent of the social desirability and observability of the traits. Experiment 4 indicated that familiar and liked persons are perceived to have more traits than unfamiliar and disliked persons.

No abstract

An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that when a belief was at issue, agreement from a dissimilar other would increase judgmental confidence more than agreement from a similar other; whereas when a value was at issue, agreement from a similar other would be more influential. The subjects judged either the relative academic success of two students (belief) or which of the two they liked more (value). The subjects were given an evaluation of the students by another subject who they had been led to believe was similar or dissimilar to themselves in terms of his style of judging other people. In all cases, the evaluation subjects received agreed with their own. The results supported the predictions.

No abstract