When good = better than average
Journal Title: Judgment and Decision Making - Year 2007, Vol 2, Issue 5
Abstract
People report themselves to be above average on simple tasks and below average on difficult tasks. This paper proposes an explanation for this effect that is simpler than prior explanations. The new explanation is that people conflate relative with absolute evaluation, especially on subjective measures. The paper then presents a series of four studies that test this conflation explanation. These tests distinguish conflation from other explanations, such as differential weighting and selecting the wrong referent. The results suggest that conflation occurs at the response stage during which people attempt to disambiguate subjective response scales in order to choose an answer. This is because conflation has little effect on objective measures, which would be equally affected if the conflation occurred at encoding.
Authors and Affiliations
Don A. Moore
Keywords
Related Articles
- EP ID EP677586
- DOI -
- Views 199
- Downloads 0
Who helps more? How self-other discrepancies influence decisions in helping situations
Research has shown that people perceive themselves as less biased than others, and as better than average in many favorable characteristics. We suggest that these types of biased perceptions regarding intentions and beha...
Decision making under hypoxia: Oxygen depletion increases risk seeking for losses but not for gains
We report a preliminary study that compared decisions made in an oxygen depleted environment with those made in a normoxic environment. Participants were presented with a series of choices that involved either losses or...
The “organic” path to obesity? Organic claims influence calorie judgments and exercise recommendations
Labeling a food as “organic” entails a claim about its production but is silent on its calorie content. Nevertheless, people infer that organic cookies are lower in calories and can be eaten more often than conventional...
Testing transitivity of preferences using linked designs
Three experiments tested if individuals show violations of transitivity in choices between risky gambles in linked designs. The binary gambles varied in the probability to win the higher (better) prize, the value of the...
Coherence and correspondence in medicine
Many controversies in medical science can be framed as tension between a coherence approach (which seeks logic and explanation) and a correspondence approach (which emphasizes empirical correctness). In many instances, a...