The typical student as an in‐group member: eliminating optimistic bias by reducing social distance

RETRACTED: Visual Darkness Reduces Perceived Risk of Contagious-Disease Transmission From Interpersonal Interaction

“…The question was to what extent participants thought they might catch the flu from that person. We drew on previous research on egocentric bias and shared fate to answer this question, and our results are entirely consistent with the existing findings on the classic egocentric bias that, generally, people think that they are less likely to suffer the negative events that others have suffered, except when comparing themselves with in-group members or similar others (Harris et al, 2000). That said, it would be interesting to explore in future research how people estimate risk of disease contagion from in-group (vs. out-group) members.…”

Warmth and competence predict overoptimistic beliefs for out-group but not in-group members

“…In line with previous research on comparative optimism [ 15 , 20 , 24 , 45 , 66 ], we performed an additional set of analyses by considering the events (and not the participants) as the unit of analysis. To determine whether the participants judged the likelihood estimates from gauging one or more event characteristics, we first conducted a series of bivariate correlations between the five event characteristics and the five sets of likelihood estimates ( Table 1 ).…”

“…Another strength of our study is that we successfully conceptualized the reference target in terms of warmth and competence, which are more adequate concepts than previously investigated characteristics such as social distance and level of similarity. Past research has conceptualized these characteristics inconsistently, either as social distance [ 24 ], vocational similarity [ 1 ], self-generated similarity [ 28 ], the amount of information known about someone [ 69 ] or left entirely to the understanding of the participant [ 11 , 26 , 29 , 30 , 51 ]. The SCM uses the warmth and competence dimensions to make predictions about intergroup emotions, attitudes and behaviors [ 89 , 137 ].…”

“…Third, the dimensions of warmth and competence could help explain likelihood estimates when the comparison target is an out-group member. Past research on overoptimistic beliefs has focused on “the average other” as a comparison target and has quantified the optimistic bias for oneself as a function of social closeness and similarity to the comparison target [ 1 , 11 , 23 , 24 , 26 – 30 , 37 , 51 , 69 ]. Because warmth and competence incorporate these previously studied characteristics but offer a clearer conceptualization and higher predictive power [ 39 , 88 ], we argue that our results expand on the past studies.…”

Impact of self‐efficacy on risk aversion in the context of surgical weight loss decision scenarios

“…11,12,29,30 There are also implications for individuals with low weight loss self- should be strategically tested and applied when aiming to increase risk perceptions or intervene with this target population. [32][33][34][35] This study's contribution should be considered within its limitations. This study included a sample assessing perceptions at one time point.…”