What it is
People often act without knowing exactly how their actions affect others. Across nine preregistered online experiments with 8,769 adults, predominantly US residents, the authors tested whether people exploit this ambiguity to make themselves look good. On average, selfish individuals inflated the social benefit of their own choice while downplaying that of the alternative, reporting the two options as more similar than prosocial individuals did; prosocial individuals portrayed their choice as comparatively more socially beneficial and also inflated their implied relative sacrifice, although less consistently.
Why it matters
The distortions appeared even before people made a choice and when choices were forced, a pattern the authors note is consistent with distortions reflecting social preferences rather than mere justification. Distortions favouring selfishness also showed evidence of contagion: others adopted them and became more selfish. The authors argue that the findings offer a psychological foundation for why polarized positions about the social impact of one's actions may emerge: when social consequences are open to interpretation, people may predictably form divergent interpretations.
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Filed underPsychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment, Social and Intergroup Psychology, Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior
