"Feeling "holier than thou
Are self-serving assessments produced by errors in self- or social prediction
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 6203358 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Nicholas Epley (0000-0003-2722-9799, Cornell University), David Dunning (0000-0002-4565-1208) |
| Year | 2000 |
| Volume | 79 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 861-875 |
| Publication date | 2000-01-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0022-3514 • E-ISSN: 1939-1315 |
| Publisher | American Psychological Association (APA) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1037/0022-3514.79.6.861 |
| PMID | 11138757 |
| OpenAlex | W2098166265 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 172 |
| References cited | 33 |
People typically believe they are more likely to engage in selfless, kind, and generous behaviors than their peers, a result that is both logically and statistically suspect. However, this oft-documented tendency presents an important ambiguity. Do people feel "holier than thou" because they harbor overly cynical views of their peers (but accurate impressions of themselves) or overly charitable views of themselves (and accurate impressions of their peers)? Four studies suggested it was the latter. Participants consistently overestimated the likelihood that they would act in generous or selfless ways, whereas their predictions of others were considerably more accurate. Two final studies suggest this divergence in accuracy arises, in part, because people are unwilling to consult population base rates when predicting their own behavior but use this diagnostic information more readily when predicting others
Feeling · Self-disclosure · Theology · Thou · Behavioral Health and Interventions · Death Anxiety and Social Exclusion · Psychology · Social and Intergroup Psychology · Social Psychology
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Do collectivists know themselves better than individualists? Cross-cultural studies of the holier than thou phenomenon
Demeaning
Value revelations
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Grandstanding
Bias
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Morality
Mind Perception
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Individual differences in reasoning
Representativeness Revisited
Perception and misperception of bias in human judgment
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The Influence of Message Framing on Residents’ Waste Separation Willingness—The Mediating Role of Moral Identity
Belief in Altruistic Motives Predicts Prosocial Actions and Inferences
Subjective Confidence as a Monitor of the Replicability of the Response
Social comparison for concern and action on climate change, racial injustice, and Covid‐19
Psychological Selfishness
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Friendship and Blackballing for Bad Beliefs
Contingencies of self-worth and the strength of deontological and utilitarian inclinations
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Goal inference in moral narratives
People underestimate the influence of repetition on truth judgments (and more so for themselves than for others)
Children’s overestimation of performance across age, task, and historical time
Marvelous Psychology
Sunk cost effects for thee but not for me
A value-congruent bias in the forgiveness forecasts of religious people
The Effects of Organizational Dependence and Hotline Administration on Whistleblowing Accounting Fraud
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‘Don’t know’ responding and estimates of perceived risk
Lake Wobegon’s guns
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Relationships and emotions in children's understanding of social contract violations
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Behavioral Ethics Meets Legal Ethics
Making molehills out of mountains
Predicting Emotional and Behavioral Reactions to Collective Wrongdoing
Are people more selfish after giving gifts
Evolving Masculinity Norms Shape Men’s Willingness to Intervene in Workplace Sexual Harassment
Where You Sit Is Where You Stand
We can’t go on together with suspicious minds
Understanding the Third-Person Perception
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Simple Heuristics in a Social World
Effects of self–other decision making on regulatory focus and choice overload
Error and bias in comparative judgment
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Predicting persons' versus a person's goodness
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If you need help, just ask
The costs and benefits of undoing egocentric responsibility assessments in groups
Deconstructing the better-than-average effect
The cheater’s high
Alone in a crowd of sheep
Increasing voting behavior by asking people if they expect to vote.
Evaluations of Self and Others
Self-Regulation of Cognitive Inference and Decision Processes
Psychological Barriers to Dispute Resolution
On Being Better but not Smarter than Others
Does Living in California Make People Happy? A Focusing Illusion in Judgments of Life Satisfaction
Subjective Construal, Social Inference, and Human Misunderstanding
Out of Control
On the psychology of prediction.
Ambiguity and Self-Evaluation
Why did he do it? attribution of obedience and the phenomenon of dispositional bias
Unskilled and unaware of it
Personal contact, individuation, and the better-than-average effect
A Bias in the Prediction of Tastes
On the consistency between attitudes and behavior
Who Protests
The person-positivity bias
On the self-erasing nature of errors of prediction
Attribution and the psychology of prediction
Global self-evaluation as determined by the desirability and controllability of trait adjectives
Egocentric empathy gaps between owners and buyers
Perception of social distributions
The disparity between the actual and assumed power of self-interest
No one in my group can be below the group's average
"Exploring the "planning fallacy
Motivated inference
Overconfident prediction of future actions and outcomes by self and others
Unrealistic optimism about future life events
The overconfidence effect in social prediction
Motivated skepticism
The case for motivated reasoning
| Unique citing works | 172 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 6,62 |
| Citation span | 2000 - 2026 (27) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | Yes |
| Citation types | Neutral: 164 |