l m e present paper was written while the first author ws a Visiting Professor at the Universiteit te Lueven. The authors are indebted to the faculty and research associates of the Laboratorium voor Experimentele Sodale Psychologie for their comments on the paper.

Past research suggests that people believe that they perform socially desirable behaviors more frequently and socially undesirable behaviors less frequently than others (Goethals, 1986;Messick, Bloom, Boldizar, & Samuelson, 1985). The present research examined whether this perception also characterizes people's thinking about intelligent and unintelligent behaviors. In Study 1 , subjects wrote lists of behaviors that they or others did. Subjects indicated that they performed more good and intelligent behaviors and fewer bad and unintelligent behaviors than others, although the magnitude of these differences was greater for good and bad acts than for intelligent and unintelligent ones. In Study 2, a different group of subjects judged the frequency with which the behaviors generated in the first study occur. While self-ascribed good behaviors were rated as occurring more frequently than the good acts of others, self-ascribed intelligent behaviors were not judged as more frequent than the intelligent acts of others. Study 3 replicated this effect using a different methodology, finding that subjects indicated they would be more likely than their peers to perform moral behaviors, but no more likely to perform intellectual behaviors. A theoretical framework is proposed in which people's positive beliefs about themselves are constrained by the publicity, specificity, and objectivity of the dimensions on which these beliefs are held.

The goals of the present study were (1) to demonstrate again that subjects in social decision tasks involving shared resources cannot be modelled as strategic money maximizers, and (2) to investigate further factors that affect the use of what we have called social decision heuristics. Subjects were led to believe that they were the first of six group members to extract points from a common pool of points. Each point extracted could possibly be exchanged for cash. The independent variables were the magnitude of the payoffs that subjects could receive (high vs. low), the divisibility of the resource (divisible vs. nondivisible), the perceived control of the last members over the group's outcomes (fate control vs. no fate control), and subjects' social values (cooperative vs. noncooperative). The results indicated that subjects anchored their decisions on an equal division heuristic. Subjects withdrew the fewest number of points when the resource was divisible, the payoffs were low, and there was fate control. The most points were taken when the resource was nondivisible, the payoffs were high, and subjects were classified as noncooperative. A model of the choice process in this task is discussed,

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Although people prefer to associate with winners, there is also a strong desire to support the lovable loser or underdog. In 4 studies, we demonstrate the underdog effect and its delimiting conditions. In Studies 1 and 2, participants rooted for the underdog in judgments of athletic, business, and artistic competition. In Study 3, participants watched animated clips of struggling and nonstruggling geometric shapes. The results showed that participants showed more rooting, sympathy, and identification with struggling shapes than with nonstruggling ones. Study 4 identified conditions under which people abandon the underdog, showing that participants rooted for the underdog only when both self‐relevance and consequences were high. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

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