I’m Better Than You Are

People tend to be overly optimistic about their own abilities and fortunes – to overestimate their standing in class, their discipline, their sincerity…… This self-inflating bias may be even stronger when it comes to moral judgment, and it can greatly influence how people judge others' actions, and ultimately their own.

People similarly overestimate their willingness to do what's morally right, whether to give to charity, vote or cooperate with a stranger. In the end, their less generous predictions about peers' behavior tend to be dead-on accurate – for themselves as well as others in the study.

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