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Schan@Stern.Nyu.Edu Egocentric Social Comparisons 2 Egocentric Social Comparisons 1 Running head: THE IRRATIONAL SIDE OF EGOCENTRISM Out of Sight, Out of Mind: On the Irrational Side of Egocentrism in Social Comparisons Steven Chan New York University John R. Chambers University of Florida Justin Kruger New York University !"#$%&'&()%#$%*+))(,-./%+,0()%1+)-"()%)(2#$#3,%13)%$+45#$$#3,6% 7.('$(%03%,3-%*#-(%3)%8+3-(%9#-"3+-%&()5#$$#3,%31%-"(%*3))($&3,0#,:%'+-"3)6 Corresponding author: Steven Chan Marketing Department Stern School of Business New York University 40 West 4th Street Tisch Hall, Room 825 New York, NY 10012 Phone: (916) 549-7813 Email: [email protected] Egocentric Social Comparisons 2 Abstract When people compare themselves to others, they egocentrically focus on self-relevant information more than on (equally) relevant information of the comparison other. For instance, an entrepreneur may overconfidently believe new subsidies represent a competitive edge against competitors, forgetting that others also reap equal benefits. This myopic bias has been highlighted in judgments across many domains including competitions, personal health risks and entrepreneurship. In contrast to myopia accounts, we show that this tendency is in part explained by egocentrism—how the self looms larger than others. Across three studies, we measured (Study 1) and manipulated (Study 2 and 3) self-other accessibility differences to demonstrate how lowered egocentrism reduces social comparison biases. Our findings (Study 3) also show that modes of competition (the structure and rules of competition) can naturally vary in how self- other differences are emphasized and impact amounts of social comparison bias in competitive contexts. Egocentric Social Comparisons 3 Out of Sight, Out of Mind: On the Irrational Side of Egocentrism in Social Comparisons Social comparisons are common in everyday life. Whether comparing their intelligence with other students, their chances of winning a round of Texas Hold‘em against other gamblers, their likelihood to contract a virus versus peers, or their ability to succeed with a startup venture relative to other entrepreneurs, people are interested in knowing their standing relative to others (Festinger, 1954). Fearing they may not be as academically gifted as their peers, students expend less effort studying and ultimately do worse in school (Marsh & Parker, 1984). Expecting that their business is more likely to survive in a competitive marketplace than other new businesses, entrepreneurs invest more and are more confident of their chances of success (Camerer & Lovallo, 1999; Moore & Cain, 2007). And convinced that they are less vulnerable to sexually transmitted diseases, people may take fewer precautions than advised (Menon, Block, & Ramanathan, 2002). Yet, as often as people compare themselves with others, a wealth of research suggests that those comparisons are systematically biased. Most people believe that they are more happy, conscientious, socially skilled, and generous than the average person, and less neurotic, impatient, and immoral (Alicke 1985; Campbell 1986). They do so in defiance of simple laws of probability that state that not everyone can be better than average. They are overconfident in competitions, believing that they have a greater chance of winning than their competitor(s) (Windschitl, Kruger, & Simms, 2003; Moore & Kim, 2003). Initially, researchers suggested that these tendencies reflected a fundamental motivation to see oneself in the most favorable light possible (Taylor & Brown, 1988; Alicke, 1985). Egocentric Social Comparisons 4 However, more recent work suggests that people occasionally see themselves in a less positive light (Chambers & Windschitl, 2004). Although people believe that they are above-average in their ability to perform easy tasks such as riding a bicycle and operating a computer mouse, for instance, they believe they are below-average in their ability to perform difficult tasks such as riding a unicycle or programming a computer (Kruger, 1999). Similarly, although they see themselves as having above-average chances of experiencing common desirable outcomes like finding a quarter lying on the ground, they believe they have below-average chances of experiencing rare desirable outcomes like finding a $50 bill lying on the ground (Chambers, Windschitl, & Suls, 2003; Kruger & Burrus, 2004). Collectively, these findings suggest that people overestimate their relative standing when absolute standing on the dimension is high and underestimate it when it is low. Evidence now suggests that when people compare themselves with others, they myopically focus on and overweight their own strengths and abilities, paying less attention to and underweighting the (equally relevant) strengths and abilities of the comparison group (Chambers et al., 2003; Klar & Giladi, 1999; Kruger, 1999). We suspect, however, that all is not equal. We suggest that the self receives the lion’s share of the attention because it is the self. Specifically, we propose that social comparisons are not merely myopic, but egocentric. After all, representations of the self are some of the most accessible representations that people possess. Conceptual representations become more accessible the more they are activitated (Higgins & Bargh, 1987; Srull & Wyer, 1979), and we spend considerably more time thinking about ourselves than we do about others. This leads to the fairly straightforward prediction that people are likely to egocentrically focus on their own strengths and achievements more than the strengths and achievements of others when they compare the two. And yet, despite nearly a Egocentric Social Comparisons 5 decade of research on the topic (including many with “egocentrism” in the title), there are no data that explicitly rule in egocentrism. The present research was designed to provide the first unequivocal evidence of egocentrism in social comparisons, as well as the biases that egocentrism engenders. In Study 1, we measured the difference in speed with which self versus other information is brought to mind and determine whether those differences mediate egocentric biases. In Study 2, salience of the competitor is directly manipulated without varying the amount of relevant information. And in Study 3, we tested whether varying competitive contexts which differ naturally in competitor salience affects social comparison biases. The present account cannot be explained by any normatively defensible judgment strategy. The fact that one’s own driving ability is more salient than the driving ability of others does not mean that the latter should be ignored unless the difference in the salience of that knowledge is confounded with differences in the validity of that knowledge—a confound we remove in the present work. Thus, whereas past work explored reasons why underweighting others in social comparisons may be rational, the present work explores the irrational side of this egocentrism. Study 1: Events Participants in Study 1 compared themselves with their peers in terms of their chances of experiencing several events, some of which were common (e.g., dialing the wrong telephone number) and some of which were rare (e.g., finding a $50 bill on the floor). They did so in both an absolute sense (e.g., How likely are you to get the flu? How likely are your peers to get the flu?), and in a comparative sense (e.g., Compared to your peers, how likely are you to get the Egocentric Social Comparisons 6 flu?). In addition, we unobtrusively recorded the length of time it took participants to make each judgment. We predicted that participants would be slower to judge their peers’ absolute chances of experiencing the events than their own chances. We also expected accessibility differences to moderate the typical above-average and below-average effects (for common and rare events respectively) such that these effects would be more pronounced among participants who are relatively slower to judge their peers’ absolute chances than their own (Chambers et al., 2003; Kruger & Burrus, 2004). Method Participants. University of Florida students (n = 104) enrolled in an elementary psychology course took part in this study for course credit. Procedure. When they arrived at the lab, participants were seated at individual computer terminals and told that they would be asked some questions about themselves and the average student at their university. After some preliminary demographic questions, a screen informed participants that they would be rating their own and other people’s chances of experiencing various events (see Table 1 for a complete list). They then rated how their chances of experiencing 16 events compared with their peers’ chances (e.g., “Compared to the average UF student, how likely are you to get into an auto accident?” each from -4 = much less likely to +4 = much more likely), as well as their own and their peers’ absolute chances for each event (e.g., “How likely are you [is the average UF student] to get into an auto accident?” each from 1 = very unlikely to 9 = very likely), with the order of these three judgments fully counterbalanced across participants. These events (taken directly from Chambers et al., 2003) were either common or rare, and desirable or undesirable, with an equal number of events in each of the four Egocentric Social Comparisons 7 categories (common/desirable, common/undesirable, etc.). The computer recorded (in milliseconds) the time it took participants to make their judgments, starting when the question appeared on the screen and ending
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