The false-uniqueness effect is an attributional type of cognitive bias in social psychology that describes how people tend to view their qualities, traits, and personal attributes as unique when in reality they are not. This bias is often measured by looking at the difference between estimates that people make about how many of their peers share a certain trait or behaviour and the actual number of peers who report these traits and behaviours. [1]
In fact, people often think that they are more unique than others in regard to desirable traits. This has been shown in a variety of studies, where, for example, people believe that they are better drivers and less risk-taking than the average driver, less prejudiced than the average resident in their town, or even more hardworking in group projects than others when they are actually not. [2] [3] [4]
This effect can also be visible when asked about desirable actions, even if consensus is against this action: "Suppose a researcher did an experiment using an actor who pretended to have a seizure, and the researcher found that 11 out of 15 people did not help the person. If you had been in the experiment, what do you think your response would have been?". [5] People tend to answer that they would have helped given the situation, believing they would do it even if that is not the case.
This cognitive bias is the converse of the false consensus effect, in which people tend to overestimate the extent to which their attitudes and behaviours are normal and typical compared to those of others. Both are related to self-esteem, which is a crucial factor in defining how people look at their behaviour. [6] People tend to experience the false uniqueness effect in regards to their desirable traits, whereas they apply the false consensus effect to justify negative traits. [7]
In 1975, Snyder and Shneckel introduced the term “illusion of uniqueness” to describe how people wrongly believe that they are different from others. However, it is Suls, Wan (1987) and Suls, Wan and Sanders (1988) who coined the term false-uniqueness effect in their studies. These two demonstrated that people with low levels of self-reported fears or people that engaged in healthy behaviours underestimated the number of low-fear peers as well as the prevalence of those that were healthy compared to the actual numbers. [8] [9]
As stated above, false uniqueness effect can be seen mostly for desirable or flattering traits and being “better than average”. In believing that people are relatively unique and better than others, they are able to enhance or at least maintain their self-esteem. In social comparison, people tend to modify, disregard, or interpret information differently to see themselves in a more positive light. This is also known as the self-enhancement theory. Seeking to ameliorate one’s self-esteem is a strong motivation to believe that your qualities are more unique than that of your peers. In fact, the false uniqueness effect is strongly associated with the perception of superiority or at least the avoidance of inferiority, which can be explained by self-preservation. [10] As self-enhancement may be a reason as to why false uniqueness effect occurs, cognitive biases or processes seek to understand how they might appear.
Egocentrism refers to the tendency for people to focus solely, or at least place more weight, on their own characteristics and neglect others’ emotions, thoughts, attributes, and/or traits. This means that if people have high abilities, strong traits, make high contributions, or have intense emotions, they are more likely to rate themselves as above average in all of these domains. On the other hand, if people judge themselves to be low in all of the previous domains, they will consider themselves to be below average. [11] This tendency to focus on one’s own absolute standing, therefore explains how people might wrongly perceive certain traits, emotions, or attitudes to be both positively or negatively unique. [12] People tend to think a lot more (and maybe even solely) about themselves when making a social comparison when they should be thinking about others as well as it could reduce false uniqueness effects.
People have a tendency to give a lot more weight to information that has been brought to our attention and overlook background information that could be important when making a social comparison, also known as focalism. When making a comparison between two things (often you and another entity), a question might be framed in a way that makes you focus more on one or the other. Research shows that patterns of false uniqueness and false consensus can vary depending on how the question is written. [13] In determining how unique you are your evaluation will depend on what has been brought to your attention, whether it be traits, emotions, or a particular group of people, which might impair you in making a rational decision.
Aligned with egocentrism, when asked to make a social comparison, information about ourselves comes much more easily to mind, because we know a lot more about ourselves than about others. Therefore the more easily information about one’s particular trait comes to mind, the more importance it will have in the judgement of uniqueness. This can be linked to the availability heuristic, where people give more importance to information that they recall quickly. In accordance with the self-enhancement theory, people might also selectively choose to compare themselves to groups that are less successful than them, known as downward social comparison, as information about people that do not have the same qualities as them might come to mind more quickly. [14]
When asked to compare ourselves to the average person, because people don’t have access to information about everyone, they tend to associate “average person” to a sub-group that may come to mind. [15] When asked “are you a better ballroom dancer than the average person?” you might think of your grandfather, your boss, your cousin, or a video you watched online and compare yourself to these, even though they are far from representing the average person. These sub-groups that are based on your knowledge and surroundings might be an unconscious explanation of false uniqueness effect.
There is a reported gender difference in the expression of the false uniqueness effect. Men tend to be biased in regards to both positive physical and social traits, whereas women tend to be more biased around positive social traits than they are physical traits. [16]
In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error (FAE) is a cognitive attribution bias in which observers underemphasize situational and environmental factors for the behavior of an actor while overemphasizing dispositional or personality factors. In other words, observers tend to overattribute the behaviors of others to their personality (e.g., he is late because he's selfish) and underattribute them to the situation or context (e.g., he is late because he got stuck in traffic). Although personality traits and predispositions are considered to be observable facts in psychology, the fundamental attribution error is an error because it misinterprets their effects.
In psychology, an attribution bias or attributional errors is a cognitive bias that refers to the systematic errors made when people evaluate or try to find reasons for their own and others' behaviors. It refers to the systematic patterns of deviation from norm or rationality in judgment, often leading to perceptual distortions, inaccurate assessments, or illogical interpretations of events and behaviors.
Egocentric bias is the tendency to rely too heavily on one's own perspective and/or have a higher opinion of oneself than reality. It appears to be the result of the psychological need to satisfy one's ego and to be advantageous for memory consolidation. Research has shown that experiences, ideas, and beliefs are more easily recalled when they match one's own, causing an egocentric outlook. Michael Ross and Fiore Sicoly first identified this cognitive bias in their 1979 paper, "Egocentric biases in availability and attribution". Egocentric bias is referred to by most psychologists as a general umbrella term under which other related phenomena fall.
The out-group homogeneity effect is the perception of out-group members as more similar to one another than are in-group members, e.g. "they are alike; we are diverse". Perceivers tend to have impressions about the diversity or variability of group members around those central tendencies or typical attributes of those group members. Thus, outgroup stereotypicality judgments are overestimated, supporting the view that out-group stereotypes are overgeneralizations. The term "outgroup homogeneity effect", "outgroup homogeneity bias" or "relative outgroup homogeneity" have been explicitly contrasted with "outgroup homogeneity" in general, the latter referring to perceived outgroup variability unrelated to perceptions of the ingroup.
Trait ascription bias is the tendency for people to view themselves as relatively variable in terms of personality, behavior and mood while viewing others as much more predictable in their personal traits across different situations. More specifically, it is a tendency to describe one's own behaviour in terms of situational factors while preferring to describe another's behaviour by ascribing fixed dispositions to their personality. This may occur because peoples' own internal states are more readily observable and available to them than those of others.
In psychology, the false consensus effect, also known as consensus bias, is a pervasive cognitive bias that causes people to "see their own behavioral choices and judgments as relatively common and appropriate to existing circumstances". In other words, they assume that their personal qualities, characteristics, beliefs, and actions are relatively widespread through the general population.
Thomas Dashiff Gilovich an American psychologist who is the Irene Blecker Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology at Cornell University. He has conducted research in social psychology, decision making, and behavioral economics, and has written popular books on these subjects. Gilovich has collaborated with Daniel Kahneman, Richard Nisbett, Lee Ross and Amos Tversky. His articles in peer-reviewed journals on subjects such as cognitive biases have been widely cited. In addition, Gilovich has been quoted in the media on subjects ranging from the effect of purchases on happiness to people's most common regrets, to perceptions of people and social groups. Gilovich is a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry.
The worse-than-average effect or below-average effect is the human tendency to underestimate one's achievements and capabilities in relation to others.
The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities. It was first described by Justin Kruger and David Dunning in 1999. Some researchers also include the opposite effect for high performers: their tendency to underestimate their skills. In popular culture, the Dunning–Kruger effect is often misunderstood as a claim about general overconfidence of people with low intelligence instead of specific overconfidence of people unskilled at a particular task.
The overconfidence effect is a well-established bias in which a person's subjective confidence in their judgments is reliably greater than the objective accuracy of those judgments, especially when confidence is relatively high. Overconfidence is one example of a miscalibration of subjective probabilities. Throughout the research literature, overconfidence has been defined in three distinct ways: (1) overestimation of one's actual performance; (2) overplacement of one's performance relative to others; and (3) overprecision in expressing unwarranted certainty in the accuracy of one's beliefs.
The negativity bias, also known as the negativity effect, is a cognitive bias that, even when positive or neutral things of equal intensity occur, things of a more negative nature have a greater effect on one's psychological state and processes than neutral or positive things. In other words, something very positive will generally have less of an impact on a person's behavior and cognition than something equally emotional but negative. The negativity bias has been investigated within many different domains, including the formation of impressions and general evaluations; attention, learning, and memory; and decision-making and risk considerations.
Positive illusions are unrealistically favorable attitudes that people have towards themselves or to people that are close to them. Positive illusions are a form of self-deception or self-enhancement that feel good; maintain self-esteem; or avoid discomfort, at least in the short term. There are three general forms: inflated assessment of one's own abilities, unrealistic optimism about the future, and an illusion of control. The term "positive illusions" originates in a 1988 paper by Taylor and Brown. "Taylor and Brown's (1988) model of mental health maintains that certain positive illusions are highly prevalent in normal thought and predictive of criteria traditionally associated with mental health."
Self-enhancement is a type of motivation that works to make people feel good about themselves and to maintain self-esteem. This motive becomes especially prominent in situations of threat, failure or blows to one's self-esteem. Self-enhancement involves a preference for positive over negative self-views. It is one of the three self-evaluation motives along with self-assessment and self-verification . Self-evaluation motives drive the process of self-regulation, that is, how people control and direct their own actions.
In social psychology, illusory superiority is a cognitive bias wherein people overestimate their own qualities and abilities compared to others. Illusory superiority is one of many positive illusions, relating to the self, that are evident in the study of intelligence, the effective performance of tasks and tests, and the possession of desirable personal characteristics and personality traits. Overestimation of abilities compared to an objective measure is known as the overconfidence effect.
Personality judgment is the process by which people perceive each other's personalities through acquisition of certain information about others, or meeting others in person. The purpose of studying personality judgment is to understand past behavior exhibited by individuals and predict future behavior. Theories concerning personality judgment focus on the accuracy of personality judgments and the effects of personality judgments on various aspects of social interactions. Determining how people judge personality is important because personality judgments often influence individuals' behaviors.
Naïve cynicism is a philosophy of mind, cognitive bias and form of psychological egoism that occurs when people naïvely expect more egocentric bias in others than actually is the case.
A zero-acquaintance situation requires a perceiver to make a judgment about a target with whom the perceiver has had no prior social interaction. These judgments can be made using a variety of cues, including brief interactions with the target, video recordings of the target, photographs of the target, and observations of the target's personal environments, among others. In zero-acquaintance studies, the target's actual personality is determined through the target's self-rating and/or ratings from close acquaintance(s) of that target. Consensus in ratings is determined by how consistently perceivers rate the target's personality when compared to other raters. Accuracy in ratings is determined by how well perceivers' ratings of a target compare to that target's self-ratings on the same scale, or to that target's close acquaintances' ratings of the target. Zero-acquaintance judgments are regularly made in day-to-day life. Given that these judgments tend to remain stable, even as the length of interaction increases, they can influence important interpersonal outcomes.
The frog pond effect is the theory that individuals evaluate themselves as worse than they actually are when in a group of higher-performing individuals. This effect is a part of the wider social comparison theory. It relates to how individuals evaluate themselves based on comparisons to other people around them, and is generally due to upward comparisons toward people who are better than themselves.
The liking gap is the disparity between how much a person believes that another person likes them, and that other person's actual opinion. Studies have found that most people underestimate how much other people like them and enjoy their company.
In social psychology, social projection is the psychological process through which an individual expects behaviors or attitudes of others to be similar to their own. Social projection occurs between individuals as well as across ingroup and outgroup contexts in a variety of domains. Research has shown that aspects of social categorization affect the extent to which social projection occurs. Cognitive and motivational approaches have been used to understand the psychological underpinnings of social projection as a phenomenon. Cognitive approaches emphasize social projection as a heuristic, while motivational approaches contextualize social projection as a means to feel connected to others. In contemporary research on social projection, researchers work to further distinguish between the effects of social projection and self-stereotyping on the individual’s perception of others.
