No one in my group can be below the group's average: A robust positivity bias in favor of anonymous peers

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

Volumn 73, Issue 5, 1997, Pages 885-901

  Klar, Yechiel ^a   Giladi, Eilath E ^a  

^a TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY   (Israel)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ADULT; ARTICLE; FEMALE; HUMAN; INDIVIDUALIZATION; PEER GROUP; PERCEPTION; PERSONALITY TEST; PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECT; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR; SOCIAL DESIRABILITY; SOCIAL PSYCHOLOGY; STUDENT;

ADULT; FEMALE; HUMANS; INDIVIDUATION; PEER GROUP; PERSONALITY ASSESSMENT; SOCIAL DESIRABILITY; SOCIAL IDENTIFICATION; SOCIAL PERCEPTION; SOCIAL VALUES; STUDENTS;

EID: 0031278641     PISSN: 00223514     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.73.5.885     Document Type: Article

References (48)

1. Alicke, M. D. (1985). Global self-evaluation as determined by the desirability and controllability of trait adjectives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49, 1621-1630.
2. Alicke, M. D., Klotz, M. L., Breitenbecher, D. L., Yurak, T. J., & Vredenburg, D. S. (1995). Personal contact, individuation, and the better-than-average effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 804-825.
3. Borgida, E., & Brekke, N. (1981). The base-rate fallacy in attribution and prediction. In J. H. Harvey, W. J. Ickes, & R. F. Kidd (Eds.), New directions in attribution research (Vol. 3, pp. 66-95). Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum.
4. Brewer, M. B. (1979). Ingroup bias in the minimal intergroup situation: A cognitive-motivational analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 86, 307-324.
5. Brigham, J. C. (1990). Limiting condition of the "physical attractiveness stereotype." Attributions about divorce. Journal of Research in Personality, 14, 365-375.
6. Brown, J. D. (1986). Evaluations of self and others: Self enhancement biases in social judgments. Social Cognition, 4, 353-376.
7. Brown, P., & Levinson, S. (1987). Politeness: Some universals in language. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.
8. Campbell, J. D. (1986). Similarity and uniqueness: The effects of attribute type, relevance, and individual differences in self-esteem and depression. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 281-293.
9. Codol, J. P. (1984a). La perception de la similitude interpersonnelle: Influence de l'appartenance catégorielle et du point de référence de la comparaison. L'Année Psychologique, 84, 43-53.
10. Codol, J. P. (1984b). Quand Dupond ressemble a Dupont plus que Dupont a Dupond. L'asymétrie de la similitude perçue entre des personnes semblables. Psychologie Française, 29, 284-290.
11. Codol, J. P., & Jarymowicz, M. (1984). L'estimation de la ressemblance entre des personnes: Quelques directions de recherche. Bulletin de Psychologie, 37, 813-822.
12. Dunning, D., Meyerowitz, J. A., & Holzberg, A. D. (1989). Ambiguity and self-evaluation: The role of idiosyncratic trait definitions in self-serving assessments of ability. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 1082-1090.
13. Eagly, A. H., Ashmore, R. D., Makhijani, M. G., & Longo, L. C. (1991). What is beautiful is good, but . . . : A meta-analytical review of research on the physical attractiveness stereotype. Psychological Bulletin, 110, 109-128.
14. Erwin, P. G., & Calev, A. (1984). The influence of Christian name stereotypes on the marking of children's essays. Behavioral Journal of Educational Psychology, 54, 223-227.
15. Fields, J. M., & Schuman, H. (1976). Public beliefs about the beliefs of the public. Public Opinion Quarterly, 40, 427-448.
16. Giladi, E. E. (1996). [Comparative biases in evaluations of soap fragrances]. Unpublished raw data.
17. Granberg, D., & Holmberg, S. (1990). The person positivity and principal actor hypotheses. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 20, 1879-1901.
18. Hamill, R., Wilson, T. D., & Nisbett, R. E. (1980). Insensitivity to sample bias: Generalizing from atypical cases. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39, 578-589.
19. Harari, H., & McDavid, J. W. (1973). Name stereotypes and teachers' expectation. Journal of Educational Psychology, 65, 222-225.
20. Holyoak, K. J., & Gordon, P. C. (1983). Social reference points. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 881-887.
21. Hoorens, V. (1995). Self-favoring biases, self-presentation and the self-other asymmetry in social comparison. Journal of Personality, 63, 793-817.
22. Hoorens, V., & Buunk, B. P. (1993). Social comparison of health risks: Locus of control, the person-positivity bias and unrealistic optimism. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 23, 291-302.
23. Jones, E. E., Wood, G. C., & Quattrone, G. A. (1981). Perceived variability of personal characteristics in in-groups and out-groups: The role of knowledge and evaluation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 7, 523-528.
24. Jöreskog, K. G., & Sörbom, D. (1993). Lisrel 8 [Computer software]. Chicago: Scientific Software International.
25. Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1973). On the psychology of prediction. Psychological Review, 80, 237-251.
26. Karylowski, J. J. (1990). Social reference points and accessibility of trait-related information in self-other similarity judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 58, 975-983.
27. Kassin, S. M. (1979). Consensus information, prediction, and causal attribution: A review of the literature and issues. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 1966-1981.
28. Keillor, G. (1985). Lake Wobegon days. New York: Viking Press.
29. Klar, Y. (1997). Lake Wobegon proves true: All my group members are above the group average. Manuscript in preparation. Tel Aviv University.
30. Klar, Y., Medding, A., & Sarel, D. (1996). Nonunique invulnerability: Singular versus distributional probabilities and unrealistic optimism in comparative risk judgments. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 67, 229-245.
31. Marks, G. (1984). Thinking one's abilities are unique and one's opinions are common. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 10, 203-208.
32. Matlin, M., & Stang, D. (1978). The Pollyanna principle. Cambridge, MA: Schenkman.
33. McDavid, J. W., & Harari, H. (1966). Stereotyping of name desirability, name uniqueness, emotional characteristics connoted by names, and temperament. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 22, 1797-1798.
34. Messick, D. M., Bloom, S., Boldizar, J. P., & Samuelson, C. D. (1985). Why we are fairer than others. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 21, 480-500.
35. Miller, C. T., & Felicio, D. M. (1990). Person-positivity bias: Are individuals liked better than groups? Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 26, 408-420.
36. Mullen, B., Brown, R., & Smith, C. (1992). Ingroup bias as a function of salience, relevance, and status: An integration. European Journal of Social Psychology, 22, 103-122.
37. Myers, D. G. (1988). Social Psychology. New York: McGraw-Hill.
38. Nilsson, I., & Ekehammer, B. (1987). Person-positivity bias in political perception? European Journal of Social Psychology, 17, 247-252.
39. Peeters, G. (1991). Evaluative influence in social cognition: The roles of direct versus indirect evaluation and positive-negative asymmetry. European Journal of Social Psychology, 21, 131-146.
40. Perloff, L. S., & Fetzer, B. K. (1986). Self-other judgments and perceived invulnerability to victimization. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 502-510.
41. Regan, P. C., Snyder, M., & Kassin, S. M. (1995). Unrealistic optimism: Self-enhancement or person positivity. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 1073-1082.
42. Schwarz, N., Knauper, B., & Hippler, H. J. (1991). Rating scales: Numeric values may change the meaning of scale labels. Public Opinion Quarterly, 55, 570-582.
43. Sears, D. O. (1983). The person-positivity bias. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 233-250.
44. Srull, K. T., & Gaelick, L. (1983). General principles and individual differences in the self as a habitual reference point: An examination of self-other judgments of similarity. Social Cognition, 2, 108-121.
45. Tajfel, H. (1970). Experiments in intergroup discrimination. Scientific American, 223, 96-102.
46. Taylor, S. E., & Brown, J. D. (1989). Positive illusions and well-being revisited: Separating fact from fiction. Psychological Bulletin, 116, 21-27.
47. Trope, Y. (1979). Uncertainty-reducing properties of achievement tasks. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 1505-1518.
48. Tversky, A. (1977). Features of similarity. Psychological Review, 84, 193-210.