Moore Don A, Small Deborah A
Tepper School of Business, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213, USA.
J Pers Soc Psychol. 2007 Jun;92(6):972-89. doi: 10.1037/0022-3514.92.6.972.
People believe that they are better than others on easy tasks and worse than others on difficult tasks. In previous attempts to explain these better-than-average and worse-than-average effects, researchers have invoked bias and motivation as causes. In this article, the authors develop a more parsimonious account, the differential information explanation, in which it is assumed only that people typically have better information about themselves than they do about others. When one's own performance is exceptional (either good or bad), it is often reasonable to assume others' will be less so. Consequently, people estimate the performance of others as less extreme (more regressive) than their own. The result is that people believe they are above average on easy tasks and below average on difficult tasks. These effects are exacerbated when people have accurate information about their performances, increasing the natural discrepancy between knowledge of the self and knowledge of others. The effects are attenuated when people obtain accurate information about the performances of others.
人们认为自己在简单任务上比别人做得好，而在困难任务上比别人做得差。在之前解释这些优于平均水平和低于平均水平效应的尝试中，研究人员将偏差和动机作为原因。在本文中，作者提出了一种更简洁的解释——差异信息解释，该解释仅假设人们通常对自己的了解比对他人的了解更好。当一个人自己的表现异常（无论是好是坏）时，通常有理由假设其他人的表现不会那么异常。因此，人们估计他人的表现比自己的表现更不极端（更具回归性）。结果是，人们认为自己在简单任务上高于平均水平，而在困难任务上低于平均水平。当人们对自己的表现有准确信息时，这些效应会加剧，从而增加自我认知与他人认知之间的自然差异。当人们获得关于他人表现的准确信息时，这些效应会减弱。
