Evidence for Egocentric Comparison in Social Judgment
David Dunning and Andrew E Hayes
Corneli University
People often disagree in their judgments of the traits and the abilities of others. Three studies sug-
gested that these differences arise because people activate and use their own particular behaviors as
norms when evaluating the performances of others. In Study l, 71% of participants reported com-
paring a target's behavior with their own behavior when providing judgments of that target. Partici-
pants also provided descriptions of their own behavior more quickly after judging another person's
behavior, suggesting they had activated information about their own behavior when judging that of
another (Studies 2 and 3 ). In all 3 studies, judgments of another's behavior tended to be egocentri-
cally related to the participants' own behavior, particularly among those who displayed the strongest
evidence of activation of self-information (Studies l and 2 ). Discussion centers on the generality of
these findings and their implications for past and future research.
The self appears to play a pervasive role in people's judgments
of others. People often assume that others will respond to situa-
tions as they would themselves (Marks & Miller, 1987; Ross,
Greene, & House, 1977 ). They tend to use the same traits and
categories to describe others as they do themselves (Lemon &
Warren, 1976; Shrauger & Patterson, 1976). They make more
extreme and confident evaluations of others on the traits they
consider to be self-descriptive (Fong & Markus, 1982; Lambert
& Wedell, 1991 ). They also imbue self-descriptive traits with
more meaning, in that information about these characteristics
is given more weight in judgments of others (Carpenter, 1988;
Lewicki, 1983; Markus, Smith, & Moreland, 1985). Further-
more, people often define social traits and categories in self-
serving ways, emphasizing those behaviors and characteristics
that place themselves and their self-concepts in a favorable light
(Dunni