Are most people happier than their peers, or are they just happy?

Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

Volumn 25, Issue 5, 1999, Pages 585-594

  Klar, Yechiel ^a   Giladi, Eilath E ^a  

^a TEL AVIV UNIVERSITY   (Israel)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 0033246007     PISSN: 01461672     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0146167299025005004     Document Type: Article

References (37)

1. 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.
2. Biernat, M. & Manis, M. (1994). Shifting standards and stereotype-based judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 66, 5-20.
3. Brown, J. D. (1986). Evaluations of self and others: Self-enhancement biases in social judgments. Social Cognition, 4, 353-376.
4. Buunk, B. P., & van der Eijnden, R.J.J.M. (1997). Perceived prevalence, perceived superiority, and relationship satisfaction: Most relationships are good, but ours is the beat. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 23, 219-228.
5. 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.
6. Codol, J.-P. (1975). On the so-called "superior conformity of the self" behavior: Twenty experimental investigations. European Journal of Social Psychology, 5, 457-501.
7. Cohen, J., & Cohen, P. (1983). Applied multiple regression/correlation analysis for the behavioral sciences. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
8. Cronbach, L.J. (1955). Processes affecting scores on "understanding the others" and "assumed similarity." Psychological Bulletin, 52, 177-193.
9. Diener, E. (1984). Subjective well-being. Psychological Bulletin, 95, 542-575.
10. Diener, E., & Diener, C. (1996). Most people are happy. Psychological Science, 7, 181-185.
11. Diener, E., & Fujita, F. (1997). Social comparison and subjective well-being. In B. P. Buunk & F. X. Gibbons (Eds.), Health, coping, and well-being: Perspectives from social comparison theory. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
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. Emmons, R. A., & Diener, E. (1985). Factors predicting satisfaction judgments: A comparative examination. Social Indicators Research, 16, 157-167.
14. Epstein, S., & Feist, G. J. (1988). Relation between self and other acceptance and its moderation by identification. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 309-315.
15. Fordyce, M. W. (1988). A review of research on the happiness measures. Social Indicators Research, 20, 355-382.
16. Fox, C. R., & Kahneman, D. (1992). Correlations, causes and heuristics in surveys of life satisfaction. Social Indicators Research, 27, 221-234.
17. Gilbert, D. T., Giesler, B. R., & Morris, K. A. (1995). When comparisons arise. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 227-236.
18. Heady, B., & Wearing, A. (1988). The sense of relative superiority - Central to well-being. Social Indicators Research, 20, 497-516.
19. Higgins, E. T., & Lurie, L. (1983). Context, categorization, and recall: The "change-of- standard" effect. Cognitive Psychology, 15, 525-547.
20. Hoorens, V. (1993). Self-enhancement and superiority biases in social comparison. European Review of Social Psychology, 4, 113-139
21. Keillor, G. (1985). Lake Wobegon days. New York: Viking.
22. Klar, Y. (1998a). Idiosyncratic reasoning, unrealistic optimism and pessimism: Self-review can modulate the comparative bias about personal risks. Unpublished manuscript, Tel-Aviv University, Israel.
23. Klar, Y. (1998b). Lake Wobegon proves true: Pseudocomparative judgments and the all-the-members-of-my-group-are-above-the-group-average effect. Submitted for publication, Tel-Aviv University, Israel.
24. Klar, Y., & Giladi, E. E. (1997). 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, 73, 885-901.
25. 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.
26. Klein, W. M. (1997). Objective standards are not enough: Affective, self-evaluative, and behavioral responses to social comparison information. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 763-774.
27. Klein, W. M., & Kunda, Z. (1993). Maintaining self-serving social comparisons: Biased reconstruction of one's past behaviors. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 19, 732-739.
28. Lykken, D., & Tellegen, A. (1996), Happiness is a stochastic phenomenon. Psychological Science, 7, 186-189.
29. Miller, D. T., & McFarland, C. (1987). Pluralistic ignorance: When similarity is interpreted as dissimilarity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 298-305.
30. Nisbett, R. E., Borgida, E., Crandall, R., & Reed, H. (1976). Popular induction: Information is not necessarily informative. In J. S. Carrol & J. W. Payne (Eds.), Cognitive and social behavior (pp. 11-133). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
31. Perloff, L. S., & Fetzer, B. K. (1986). Self-other judgments and perceived invulnerability to victimization. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 502-510.
32. Rothman, A. J., Klein, B. W., & Weinstein, N. D. (1996). Absolute and relative biases in estimation of personal risks. Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 26, 1213-1236.
33. Weinstein, N. D. (1996). Optimistic biases about risks and future life events. Unpublished bibliography, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ.
34. Weinstein, N. D., & Lachendro, E. (1982). Egocentrism as a source of unrealistic optimism. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 8, 195-200.
35. Wood, J. V. (1996). What is social cognition and how should we study it? Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22, 520-537.
36. Wood, J. V., & Taylor, S. E. (1991). Serving self-relevant goals through social comparison. In J. Suls & T. A. Wills (Eds.), Social comparison: Contemporary theory and research (pp. 23-49). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
37. Wright, S. J. (1985). Health satisfaction: A detailed test of the multiple discrepancies theory model. Social Indicators Research, 17, 299-313.