Overestimating the valuations and preferences of others.

Abstract

People often make judgments about their own and others’ valuations and preferences. Across 12 studies (N = 17,594), we find a robust bias in these judgments such that people overestimate the valuations and preferences of others. This overestimation arises because, when making predictions about others, people rely on their intuitive core representation of the experience (e.g., is the experience generally positive?) in lieu of a more complex representation that might also include countervailing aspects (e.g., is any of the experience negative?). We first demonstrate that the overestimation bias is pervasive for a wide range of positive (Studies 1–5) and negative experiences (Study 6). Furthermore, the bias is not merely an artifact of how preferences are measured (Study 7). Consistent with judgments based on core representations, the bias significantly reduces when the core representation is uniformly positive (Studies 8A–8B). Such judgments lead to a paradox in how people see others trade off between valuation and utility (Studies 9A–9B). Specifically, relative to themselves, people believe that an identically paying other will get more enjoyment from the same experience, but paradoxically, that an identically enjoying other will pay more for the same experience. Finally, consistent with a core representation explanation, explicitly prompting people to consider the entire distribution of others’ preferences significantly reduced or eliminated the bias (Study 10). These findings suggest that social judgments of others’ preferences are not only largely biased, but they also ignore how others make trade-offs between evaluative metrics.

More Useful to You: Believing That Others Find the Same Objects More Useful

“…Participants reported usefulness using our two-item usefulness scale from previous studies (Cotton swabs α = .95; Markers α = .88; Mouthwash α = .89; Sponges α = .86). They also indicated their own or their estimate of the target consumer's WTP per product on a slider from €0 to €20 (€0 to €10 for Markers), which we expected to serve as a converging measure (Jung et al 2020). Finally, we measured how sophisticated, selective, and exclusive they perceived themselves or their target to be (1 = Not at all; 7 = Very much); we averaged these three items into a perceived sophistication scale (α = .74).…”

“…Finally, we want to reflect on a recent investigation with findings similar to ours. Jung, Moon, and Nelson (2020) found that for experiences, individuals believe others will enjoy positive (and dislike negative) experiences more than they themselves would. Although the focus of their studies is on experiential enjoyment while the focus of ours is on usefulness, their proposed process is worth considering.…”

“…Although the focus of their studies is on experiential enjoyment while the focus of ours is on usefulness, their proposed process is worth considering. Jung et al (2020) argue that individuals believe others will have more extreme experiences for one of two reasons: 1) when evaluating ownexperiences, individuals engage in more processing, leading them to assess not just the core representation (valence) of the experience but also countervailing aspects, whereas when evaluating other-experiences, individuals do not adequately incorporate these countervailing aspects; or 2) individuals hold an intuition that other-experiences will more closely track the core representation of the experience. Whereas the first rationale is a processing bias, the second rationale is a self-other discrepancy on the order of our perceived materialism explanation.…”

Replication and Extension of Alicke (1985) Better-Than-Average Effect for Desirable and Controllable Traits

“…Coming to social psychology results, there are several examples of replication of studies originally conducted with U.S. American undergraduate students who were successfully replicated with MTurk. For instance, overestimation of others' willingness to pay (Frederick, 2012) was successfully replicated on MTurk (Jung et al, 2019;Study 3). An ongoing mass-replication effort successfully replicated a large number of judgment and decision-making studies using Amazon MTurk, with results consistent with student samples and other online recruitment platforms such as Prolific (Chandrashekar et al, 2019;Chen et al, 2020;Collaborative Open-Science Research, 2020;.…”

Consumers Believe That Products Work Better for Others

“…Similarly, research in the communications literature has shown that consumers believe that other people are more influenced by advertising than they are themselves (Davison 1983). In this vein, research in psychology has shown that people believe they are less affected by decision making biases (Pronin, Gilovich, and Ross 2004), and likewise less emotionally affected by experiences, such as a flight to Paris (Jung, Moon, and Nelson 2020). Evidently, people consider themselves to be relative stoics, believing that their personalities, preferences, and values will remain relatively the same, especially when forecasting future change (Quoidbach, Gilbert, and Wilson 2013).…”