Feeling "holier than thou": Are self-serving assessments produced by errors in self- or social prediction?

The case for motivated reasoning.

1990 • 7,405 citations

On the psychology of prediction.

1973 • 6,028 citations

Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.

1999 • 5,617 citations

Unrealistic optimism about future life events.

1980 • 4,530 citations

Out of Control: Visceral Influences on Behavior

1996 • 2,565 citations

Social comparison : contemporary theory and research

1991 • 1,385 citations

Motivated skepticism: Use of differential decision criteria for preferred and nonpreferred conclusions.

1992 • 1,217 citations

Intuitive prediction: Biases and corrective procedures

1982 • 1,113 citations

Immune neglect: A source of durability bias in affective forecasting.

1998 • 1,064 citations

Motivated inference: Self-serving generation and evaluation of causal theories.

1987 • 1,012 citations

Exploring the "planning fallacy": Why people underestimate their task completion times.

1994 • 992 citations

Global self-evaluation as determined by the desirability and controllability of trait adjectives.

1985 • 960 citations

Personal contact, individuation, and the better-than-average effect.

1995 • 871 citations

Does Living in California Make People Happy? A Focusing Illusion in Judgments of Life Satisfaction

1998 • 865 citations

Evaluations of Self and Others: Self-Enhancement Biases in Social Judgments

1986 • 848 citations

The norm of self-interest.

1999 • 837 citations

Ambiguity and Self-Evaluation: The Role of Idiosyncratic Trait Definitions in Self-Serving Assessments of Ability

2002 • 699 citations

Automatic processing of fundamental information: The case of frequency of occurrence.

1984 • 663 citations

Attribution and the psychology of prediction.

1975 • 615 citations

On the self-erasing nature of errors of prediction.

1980 • 517 citations

The person-positivity bias.

1983 • 447 citations

Subjective Construal, Social Inference, and Human Misunderstanding

1991 • 396 citations

On the consistency between attitudes and behavior: Look to the method of attitude formation

1977 • 394 citations

A Bias in the Prediction of Tastes

1995 • 391 citations

Psychological Barriers to Dispute Resolution

1995 • 390 citations

Egocentric empathy gaps between owners and buyers: Misperceptions of the endowment effect.

2000 • 333 citations

Increasing voting behavior by asking people if they expect to vote.

1987 • 311 citations

On Being Better but not Smarter than Others: The Muhammad Ali Effect

1989 • 309 citations

Self-Regulation of Cognitive Inference and Decision Processes

1994 • 287 citations

The overconfidence effect in social prediction.

1990 • 281 citations

The disparity between the actual and assumed power of self-interest.

1998 • 272 citations

Overconfident prediction of future actions and outcomes by self and others.

1990 • 259 citations

The Role of Motivated Reasoning in Optimistic Time Predictions

1997 • 258 citations

Absolute and Relative Biases in Estimations of Personal Risk¹

1996 • 234 citations

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

1997 • 233 citations

The Uniqueness Bias: Studies of Constructive Social Comparison

2024 • 195 citations

The role of construal processes in overconfident predictions about the self and others.

1990 • 183 citations

Perception of social distributions.

1985 • 169 citations

Self-interest and fairness in problems of resource allocation: Allocators versus recipients.

1997 • 156 citations

Maintaining Self-Serving Social Comparisons: Biased Reconstruction of One's Past Behaviors

1993 • 137 citations

Automatic encoding of event frequency: Further findings.

1982 • 133 citations

Being more honest but not necessarily more intelligent than others: generality and explanations for the Muhammad Ali effect

1998 • 113 citations

Egocentric empathy gaps between owners and buyers: Misperceptions of the endowment effect.

2000 • 97 citations

Who Protests: Self-Interest and White Opposition to Busing

1992 • 96 citations

Judgments of Self-Other Similarity

1990 • 81 citations

Being Better but Not Smarter than Others: The Muhammad Ali Effect at Work in Iterpersonal Situations

1991 • 63 citations

Why did he do it? attribution of obedience and the phenomenon of dispositional bias

1979 • 63 citations

The Way of Lao Tzu

1963 • 55 citations

Truly Incidental Encoding of Frequency Information

1987 • 33 citations