Egocentric definitions of traits and abilities in social judgment.

1992/09/01 by David Dunning, Geoffrey L. Cohen · 2 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Big Five personality traits #Cognitive psychology #Developmental psychology #Optimism, Hope, and Well-being #Perception #Personality #Personality Traits and Psychology #Psychology #Social and Intergroup Psychology #Social perception #Social psychology

paper · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.63.3.341

openalex publication_date 1992/09/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/26

Abstract

People possess idiosyncratic, self-serving definitions of traits and abilities. This observation was supported by 6 studies in which people articulated the performances along behavioral criteria (e.g., math Scholastic Achievement Test score) necessary to qualify for relevant traits (e.g., math ability) or made judgments about performances attained by other people. When making judgments of others, high-performing Ss tended to rate target performances less favorably than did low-performing Ss, with these disagreements most pronouced when the target's performance was low

Citations

• Global self-evaluation as determined by the desirability and controllability of trait adjectives.
• Ten years of research on the false-consensus effect: An empirical and theoretical review.
• The “false consensus effect”: An egocentric bias in social perception and attribution processes
• Motivated inference: Self-serving generation and evaluation of causal theories.
• Unrealistic optimism about future life events.
• The case for motivated reasoning.
• Illusion and well-being: A social psychological perspective on mental health.

Cited by

• A new look at motivated inference: Are self-serving theories of success a product of motivational forces?
• Self-enhancement [wikipedia]