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Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Vol. 19, No. 6, 732-739 (1993)
DOI: 10.1177/0146167293196008
© 1993 Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.

Maintaining Self-Serving Social Comparisons: Biased Reconstruction of One's Past Behaviors

Wilim M. Klein

Colby College

Ziva Kunda

University of Waterloo

People believe that they perform fewer health-threatening behaviors than their average peer Men such beliefs were challenged by information about the actual average behavior frequencies reported by their peers, subjects shifted their own self-views and reported engaging in these behaviors less frequently than controls did. Evidently, this biased reconstruction of their own past behavioral patterns was designed to permit subjects to maintain the belief that they were superior to their peers. This interpretation was strengthened by the finding that no shifts in self-reported behavioral frequencies occurred for subjects given inflated peer averages to which most subjects were able to view themselves as superior without biasing their self-ports.


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