People often judge themselves to be at lower risk for various negative life events than are their peers. The two empirical studies presented here show that the magnitude of this optimistic bias can be either negatively or positively related to the perceived frequency of the event, depending on whether people judge their own risk relative to that of an average peer (make comparative risk judgments) or judge their own and an average peer's risk separately (make absolute risk judgments). A new two-process model is presented to account for these results. The model combines a better-thanaverage heuristic with elements of the singular target-focused and singular-distributional models
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