Maybe holier, but definitely less evil, than you: Bounded self-righteousness in social judgment.

Abstract

Few biases in human judgment are easier to demonstrate than self-righteousness: the tendency to believe one is more moral than others. Existing research, however, has overlooked an important ambiguity in evaluations of one's own and others' moral behavior that could lead to an overly simplistic characterization of self-righteousness. In particular, moral behavior spans a broad spectrum ranging from doing good to doing bad. Self-righteousness could indicate believing that one is more likely to do good than others, less likely to do bad, or both. Based on cognitive and motivational mechanisms, we predicted an asymmetry in the degree of self-righteousness such that it would be larger when considering unethical actions (doing bad) than when considering ethical actions (doing good). A series of experiments confirmed this prediction. A final experiment suggests that this asymmetry is partly produced by the difference in perspectives that people adopt when evaluating themselves and others (Experiment 8). These results all suggest a bounded sense of self-righteousness. Believing one "less evil than thou" seems more reliable than believing one is "holier than thou." (PsycINFO Database Record

My mind, your mind, and God's mind: How children and adults conceive of different agents’ moral beliefs

“…In contrast, adults typically distinguished among agents; for example, they reported that they were more likely than God or another person to think that good behaviours were acceptable. Adults may have viewed themselves as more moral than other people, consistent with work showing that Western adults value uniqueness (Fromkin & Snyder, 1980) and evaluate themselves more positively than others (Klein & Epley, 2016;Pronin, 2008).…”

Doing good vs. avoiding bad in prosocial choice: A refined test and extension of the morality preference hypothesis

“…Consistent with this hypothesis, recent evidence suggests that "selfrighteousness" -manifested in, for example, the average person rating themselves morally superior to the average person (Tappin & McKay, 2017) -are greater for immoral than moral stimuli (Klein & Epley, 2016. Relatedly, the correlation between individuals' life satisfaction and their self-perception is reportedly stronger if the latter is computed as the distance between individuals' "real" and "undesired" selves vs. between their "real" and "desired" selves (Ogilvie, 1987).…”

Belief in altruistic motives predicts prosocial actions and inferences

“…Alternatively, people might believe that they are more altruistic than others (i.e., seeing oneself as an altruist among egoists). Prior work suggests that people overestimate their selflessness -especially when comparing themselves to others (Epley & Dunning, 2000;Pronin, 2007;Rempel et al, 1985; but see also Klein & Epley, 2016). As such, beliefs about altruism may feature a motivated bias that places oneself above the average person (Kunda, 1990).…”