Considering the Situation: Why People are Better Social Psychologists than Self-psychologists

Abstract

Are people better self- or social psychologists when they predict prosocial behavior? Why might people be more or less accurate when predicting their own and others' actions? In two studies, participants considered variants of situations classically known to influence helping behavior (being alone vs. in a group, being in a good rather than bad mood). Participants made predictions about how they and their peers would act. Their predictions revealed that participants incorporated situational variations into social predictions, yet failed to do so when making self-predictions. These errors in self-prediction were not generated by response scale-type. This evidence suggests that people more appropriately use their knowledge of situational pressures when engaging in social rather than self-predictions.

Keywords:

• Above average effect
• Accuracy
• Motivation
• Social predictions
• Situation

Acknowledgments

The research was supported financially by National Institute of Mental Health Grant RO1 56072 and National Science Foundation Grant 0745806 awarded to DD.

We thank Shana Cole for comments on this manuscript. We also thank Chelsea Finn, Lorraine Ricci, Michael VanWert, and Gabriel Gabrosek for assistance with data collection.

Notes

It is possible that people did not actually think they and others would respond differently to the charity opportunity, but instead thought watching funny movies and eating candy would improve their own mood but will do little to change others' moods. To test this, a separate group of participants (n = 14) imagined either the good or bad mood inductions and predicted their own mood and the mood of another person using the same mood measures as in Study 2. In a 2 (Mood Condition: good, bad) × 2 (Target: self, other) repeated-measures ANOVA (mood as a between-, target as within-subjects variable), there only a main effect of Mood, F(1, 12) = 21.11, p = .001, Ms = 3.9 and 2.9 for good and bad mood conditions, respectively. There was no main effect of Target or interaction. These data indicate participants believed the mood manipulations would equally affect themselves and others. This concern does not pertain to Study 1, as it is not possible for participants to believe that they and others would experience different group sizes.

We tested whether self-presentational concerns shaped predictions by varying the public or private nature of the predictions. Since being perceived as better than others is a strong motivation, particularly for Americans (Balcetis et al., 2008), making predictions more public could exacerbate the differences between self- and social prediction relative to actual base rates. In Study 2, we randomly assigned half of the participants to the public prediction condition; they wrote their names, e-mail addresses, and university majors on the top of the survey and handed their survey back to the experimenter after completing it. We randomly assigned the others to the private prediction condition; they were reminded that responses were anonymous and could not be tied to any identifying information. These participants placed their completed surveys in envelopes and deposited their sealed envelopes into a box containing many other envelopes. We conducted all analyses including the Anonymity variable and found no main effects or interactions. These results suggest that the effects are unlikely to be driven by concerns regarding self-presentation or anonymity.