IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/eee/jobhdp/v122y2013i2p200-213.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

People believe that they are prototypically good or bad

Author

Listed:
  • Roy, Michael M.
  • Liersch, Michael J.
  • Broomell, Stephen

Abstract

People have been shown to view their beliefs as being prototypical (modal) but their abilities as (falsely) unique (above or below average). It is possible that these two viewpoints – self as prototypical and self as unique – can be reconciled. If the distribution of ability for a given skill is skewed such that many others have high (low) ability and few others have low (high) ability, it is possible that a majority of peoples’ self-assessments can be above (below) average. Participants in 5 studies demonstrated an understanding that various skills have skewed ability distributions and their self-assessments were related to distribution shape: high when negatively skewed and low when positively skewed. Further, participants tended to place themselves near the mode of their perceived skill distribution. Participants were most likely to think that they were good at skills for which they thought that most others were also good.

Suggested Citation

  • Roy, Michael M. & Liersch, Michael J. & Broomell, Stephen, 2013. "People believe that they are prototypically good or bad," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 122(2), pages 200-213.
    • Handle: RePEc:eee:jobhdp:v:122:y:2013:i:2:p:200-213
    DOI: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2013.07.004
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0749597813000733
    Download Restriction: Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1016/j.obhdp.2013.07.004?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Moore, Don A. & Cain, Daylian M., 2007. "Overconfidence and underconfidence: When and why people underestimate (and overestimate) the competition," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 103(2), pages 197-213, July.
    2. Noah J. Goldstein & Robert B. Cialdini & Vladas Griskevicius, 2008. "A Room with a Viewpoint: Using Social Norms to Motivate Environmental Conservation in Hotels," Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Consumer Research Inc., vol. 35(3), pages 472-482, March.
    3. Baron, Jonathan, 1997. "Confusion of Relative and Absolute Risk in Valuation," Journal of Risk and Uncertainty, Springer, vol. 14(3), pages 301-309, May-June.
    4. Moore, Don A., 2007. "Not so above average after all: When people believe they are worse than average and its implications for theories of bias in social comparison," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 102(1), pages 42-58, January.
    5. repec:cup:judgdm:v:2:y:2007:i::p:277-291 is not listed on IDEAS
    Full references (including those not matched with items on IDEAS)

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Robert Bordley & Marco Licalzi & Luisa Tibiletti, 2017. "A Target-Based Foundation for the “Hard-Easy Effect” Bias," Eurasian Studies in Business and Economics, in: Mehmet Huseyin Bilgin & Hakan Danis & Ender Demir & Ugur Can (ed.), Country Experiences in Economic Development, Management and Entrepreneurship, pages 659-671, Springer.

    Most related items

    These are the items that most often cite the same works as this one and are cited by the same works as this one.
    1. Oliver Gloede & Lukas Menkhoff, 2014. "Financial Professionals' Overconfidence: Is It Experience, Function, or Attitude?," European Financial Management, European Financial Management Association, vol. 20(2), pages 236-269, March.
    2. Glaser, Markus & Weber, Martin, 2007. "Why inexperienced investors do not learn: They do not know their past portfolio performance," Finance Research Letters, Elsevier, vol. 4(4), pages 203-216, December.
    3. Brown, Jason L. & Farrington, Sukari & Sprinkle, Geoffrey B., 2016. "Biased self-assessments, feedback, and employees' compensation plan choices," Accounting, Organizations and Society, Elsevier, vol. 54(C), pages 45-59.
    4. repec:cup:judgdm:v:17:y:2022:i:2:p:449-486 is not listed on IDEAS
    5. Rose, Jason P. & Windschitl, Paul D., 2008. "How egocentrism and optimism change in response to feedback in repeated competitions," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 105(2), pages 201-220, March.
    6. Radzevick, Joseph R. & Moore, Don A., 2008. "Myopic biases in competitions," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 107(2), pages 206-218, November.
    7. Robert Libby & Kristina Rennekamp, 2012. "Self‐Serving Attribution Bias, Overconfidence, and the Issuance of Management Forecasts," Journal of Accounting Research, Wiley Blackwell, vol. 50(1), pages 197-231, March.
    8. Jean‐Pierre Benoît & Juan Dubra, 2011. "Apparent Overconfidence," Econometrica, Econometric Society, vol. 79(5), pages 1591-1625, September.
    9. Don A. Moore, 2007. "When good = better than average," Judgment and Decision Making, Society for Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 2, pages 277-291, October.
    10. Samuel A Swift & Don A Moore & Zachariah S Sharek & Francesca Gino, 2013. "Inflated Applicants: Attribution Errors in Performance Evaluation by Professionals," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 8(7), pages 1-15, July.
    11. Max Korbmacher & Ching (Isabelle) Kwan & Gilad Feldman, 2022. "Both better and worse than others depending on difficulty: Replication and extensions of Kruger’s (1999) above and below average effects," Judgment and Decision Making, Society for Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 17(2), pages 449-486, March.
    12. Murad, Zahra & Starmer, Chris, 2021. "Confidence snowballing and relative performance feedback," Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, Elsevier, vol. 190(C), pages 550-572.
    13. repec:cup:judgdm:v:2:y:2007:i::p:277-291 is not listed on IDEAS
    14. Moore, Don A. & Klein, William M.P., 2008. "Use of absolute and comparative performance feedback in absolute and comparative judgments and decisions," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 107(1), pages 60-74, September.
    15. Moore, Don A. & Cain, Daylian M., 2007. "Overconfidence and underconfidence: When and why people underestimate (and overestimate) the competition," Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, Elsevier, vol. 103(2), pages 197-213, July.
    16. Lucius Caviola & Nadira Faulmüller & Jim. A. C. Everett & Julian Savulescu & Guy Kahane, 2014. "The evaluability bias in charitable giving: Saving administration costs or saving lives?," Judgment and Decision Making, Society for Judgment and Decision Making, vol. 9(4), pages 303-315, July.
    17. Todd D. Gerarden & Richard G. Newell & Robert N. Stavins, 2017. "Assessing the Energy-Efficiency Gap," Journal of Economic Literature, American Economic Association, vol. 55(4), pages 1486-1525, December.
    18. Alpízar, Francisco & Martinsson, Peter, 2010. "Don’t Tell Me What to Do, Tell Me Who to Follow! - Field Experiment Evidence on Voluntary Donations," Working Papers in Economics 452, University of Gothenburg, Department of Economics.
    19. Asuamah Yeboah, Samuel, 2023. "Sustaining Change: Unravelling the Socio-cultural Threads of Sustainable Consumption," MPRA Paper 117981, University Library of Munich, Germany, revised 10 Jun 2023.
    20. Nathaniel Geiger, 2022. "Perceptions of Self-Motives and Environmental Activists’ Motives for Pro-Environmental Behavior," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 14(17), pages 1-12, August.
    21. Ajla Cosic & Hana Cosic & Sebastian Ille, 2018. "Can nudges affect students' green behaviour? A field experiment," Journal of Behavioral Economics for Policy, Society for the Advancement of Behavioral Economics (SABE), vol. 2(1), pages 107-111, March.
    22. Sarah Verdonk & Keri Chiveralls & Drew Dawson, 2017. "Getting Wasted at WOMADelaide: The Effect of Signage on Waste Disposal," Sustainability, MDPI, vol. 9(3), pages 1-17, February.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:eee:jobhdp:v:122:y:2013:i:2:p:200-213. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    If CitEc recognized a bibliographic reference but did not link an item in RePEc to it, you can help with this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Catherine Liu (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/obhdp .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.