BazermanMoore

Positive Illusions 91
players or wittier cocktail party conversationalists. Allison, Messick, and Goethals
(1989) reason that it is harder to have optimistic illusions when they are inconsistent
with easily available, objective data. In the same way, it may be easier for negotiators to
maintain the belief that they are fairer than other negotiators than to believe that they
are more skillful at reaching profitable agreements. Similarly, Wade-Benzoni, Li,
Thompson, and Bazerman (in press) find that people rate themselves more highly on
the overall dimension of being environmentally friendly than on specific behaviors such
as recycling, reusing paper, or turning off lights.
Research on positive illusions has overlooked the difference between two forms of
self-enhancement: overestimation and overplacement. Overestimation occurs when
people overestimate their performance, chances of success, or control of a situation.
Overplacement occurs when people incorrectly rank themselves as better than others
at particular tasks. Research has documented some intriguing inconsistencies between
these different types of positive illusions (Moore & Healy, 2007). Perhaps the most
notable of these inconsistencies is the fact that overestimation and overplacement are
negatively correlated with each other across tasks. In other words, people most often
tend to overestimate their own performance concerning difficult tasks, while actually
tending to underestimate their performance on easy tasks (Burson, Larrick, &
Klayman, 2006; Erev, Wallsten, & Budescu, 1994). But people also are most likely to
report believing that they are better than others on easy tasks and worse than others on
difficult tasks (Moore & Kim, 2003; Windschitl, Kruger, & Simms, 2003). Most people
believe that they are above-average drivers, for example, but also that they are belowaverage
unicycle riders (Kruger, 1999).
Moore and Small (2007) offer an explanation for this apparent inconsistency. They
point out that the overestimation of performance on difficult tasks (and underestimation
on easy tasks) can easily be explained by the fact that, in most domains, people
simply have imperfect information about themselves. When a person’s performance at
a task is remarkably good, she is much more likely to underestimate her performance
than to overestimate it. At the same time, the information that people have about others
is usually worse than the information they have about themselves. Consequently, our
estimates of others are less extreme than our estimates of ourselves. The result is a
pattern illustrated in Figure 5.1.
This theory helps to explain other data on comparative optimism that show the
same inconsistency. Comparative optimism is the belief people have that they are
more likely than others to experience positive events, but less likely than others to experience
negative events (Weinstein, 1980). The inconsistency is between the estimation
of the probability of risk and the placement of one’s own risk relative to that of others.
For instance, although the average woman believes she is less likely than other women
to fall ill with breast cancer, the average woman also overestimates her actual risk by as
much as eight times (Woloshin, Schwartz, Black, & Welch, 1999). Similarly, Americans
tend to believe that they are less likely than other Americans to be the victims of terrorist
attacks, yet to radically overestimate their own actual risk (Lerner, Gonzalez, Small,
& Fischhoff, 2003). In addition, teenagers substantially overestimate their chances of
dying in the coming year, yet still believe that they are less likely to die than are others
like them (Fischhoff, Parker, Bruine de Bruin, Downs, Palmgren, & Manski, 2000).