Americans aren't as nice as they think they are

ITHACA, N.Y. -- Most people are better judges of other people's moral character than they are of their own.

Experiments conducted at Cornell University and reported in theJournal of Personality and Social Psychology (Vol. 79, No. 6, pp. 861-87) found many people making an error in self-assessment. Participants in the survey consistently tended to overestimate their own generosity, but actually were quite accurate when predicting the generous behavior of others, according to Nicholas Epley, a graduate student of psychology, and David Dunning, a professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell.

"Most people are overly optimistic about themselves," Dunning says. "As it turns out, we don't know as much about our own moral nature as we know about others'."

It has long been known -- both in psychological research and in everyday life -- that people commonly feel "holier than thou," believing that they are more moral, kind and altruistic than the typical person, the psychology professor says.

"We knew something had to be wrong when the average person thinks he or she's a better person than the average person, when the majority of Americans consider themselves to be members of an elite moral minority," says Epley, who conducted a series of revealing experiments about subjects' perception versus the reality of their moral behavior. "We wanted to know whether people feel holier than thou because they underestimate others' moral goodness, or because they overestimate their own."(See brief descriptions of the experiments, attached) .

Each experiment asked college students at Cornell to predict how they would behave when faced with one of several moral dilemmas, and to make the same predictions for their peers. Again and again, people predicted that they would be more generous and kind than others. Yet when the time came to put their money where their mouths were, most kept their wallet in their pockets.

This inaccuracy in self-prediction was matched by an impressive ability in predicting how other people would respond to the same morality moments. In psychological terms, the experimental subjects were successfully anticipating the base rate of moral behavior and accurately predicting how often others, in general, would be self-sacrificing. The problem is that people don't use their wisdom about others to successfully predict their own actions, Dunning notes. "Even when we know that other people will be selfish, we think we're special, that the rules don't apply to us," Dunning explains.

For example, in one study students said they would donate roughly half of their $5 fee for participating in the experiment to charity, if given a chance, but that other students on average would donate only about $1.80. When students were actually given a chance to donate their fee, the average donation was only $1.53.

In another particularly telling experiment, students were given the choice of performing an onerous, time-consuming task themselves or assigning the work to someone else. The "someone" in some cases was another college student and, in others, a 10-year-old girl who presumably would have great difficulty with the task.

Many students predicted they would take on the onerous task themselves, particularly when the other person was a little girl. However, most students facing an actual decision chose the easier job for themselves and were just as likely to do so whether they were assigning the difficult task to another college student or to the youngster.

"The only thing they were responding to was self-interest," Epley says. "Whether they were dealing with another college student or a little girl made no difference."

The "holier than thou" experiment was supported by a grant from the U.S. National Institute of Mental Health for studies of human capacity for self-insight.

A total of $19.89 was actually donated to charities from the experiment asking subjects to predict how much of their participation fee they would give to the needy. Had the subjects followed through with their good intentions, the charities would have received $31.72.