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Abstract(s)
Research on comparative biases has long shown a better-than-average effect—whereby people tend to believe themselves to be better than the average other person—as well as a tendency to judge individuals more favorably than groups. Whereas self-other differences have been extensively studied, less is known about individual-collective differences: what features of others best predict when asymmetries occur, what processes explain those asymmetries, and what sources of information people draw from in their judgments. In three empirical chapters, I seek to provide answers to these questions. I found that singularity (i.e., the target’s status as a mere individual versus multiple individuals) is sufficient to generate different judgments. In three different paradigms, adapted from very different areas of research, I consistently find that individuals are judged more benevolently than collectives—even when the individuals are described with no further individuating information than collectives (i.e., participants simply know they are making judgments about a single individual, as opposed to members of a collective). In Chapter II, I introduce a novel measure of the valence of moral judgments, clearly distinguishing whether people (self or other people) are judged positively or negatively. Whereas people consistently display self-positivity (i.e., they see themselves as morally adequate), others are perceived negatively or positively as a function of whether they are a collective or a single individual. We replicated this effect of singularity with additional paradigms, showing that people (a) perceive the attitudinal responses of an individual as more authentic than those of the group the individual belongs to (Chapter III); and (b) put greater value on individual lives than on the lives of collectives when assessing casualties (of wars or other events; Chapter IV). Moreover, whereas previous research showed that people rely on target-related attributes (e.g., population base rates and target-idiosyncratic information) when making social judgments, these studies show evidence for perceiver-related influences on judgment: In Chapter II, we
show that participants’ anticipated feelings about misjudging others predict the moral judgments they make about those people. Specifically, participants expected to feel worse when misjudging an individual versus a collective, and this explains why their judgments are benevolent for individuals. In Chapter III, we measured participants’ attitudinal conflict towards various social groups (i.e., the fact that their automatic attitudinal responses were sometimes more negative than their controlled responses) and showed that this conflict influenced perceptions of the authenticity of others’ attitudes: When participants themselves were conflicted about a group, they tended to perceive others’ attitudinal responses toward that group as less authentic. In the final chapter, I discuss the main contributions and societal implications of this work and reflect on open questions and future research that my findings inspire.
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Keywords
better-than-average effect individuals vs. collectives moral judgment perceived authenticity identifiable victim effec efeito better-than-average indivíduos vs. colectivos julgamento moral autenticidade percebida efeito da vitima identificável