André Vaz

And so, of course, you know, if you have information about others, if it's a friend, you know your friend has good intentions, so you're also going to judge your friend as better than average, you know, more moral, etc.,

But even outside of that, definitely there's this better than average effect also extended to your extended self, your acquaintances, your friends, your family, your in-group, definitely.

And that would be part of the reason.

But in our research, we find that even without knowing anything at all about the individual, people already judge that individual more positively.

Yeah.

So, I mean, yeah, just to reiterate what you just said.

So, you know, in our research, we, so this was already kind of known, right?

So people rank themselves higher than others and then individual others higher than groups.

What we introduced, you know, in our research was just this concept of, you know, basically ask them, you know, if you're doing a certain behavior, how often do you have to behavior to be a good person?

Now, if you do it less than that, you're a bad person.

If you do it more, you're a good person.

And this is interesting because then when you ask people to make these judgments about themselves and others, we can really see if they place themselves not just higher than others, but in the positive or in the negative side.

And as said, of course, people judge themselves much higher than others, but they judge individuals, random individuals, higher than the group.

And what's to me very interesting about this is that they don't know any more about the individual than they know about the group, right?

If we think about the group on average, and this is just a random person, there should be no differences, but people do make those judgments more positively about the individual.

And yeah, so one reason that we find in that, and I think kind of connects to the argument I made earlier that we interact with individuals, is that

when people think about the possibility that they might be wrong, you know, say that you're making a judgment about someone and maybe later you find out that you're wrong, whether or not the person ever finds out that you made that judgment, you find out that you're wrong, how guilty would you feel, right?

How mean would you feel that you were?

And turns out people actually think that they, I don't know if they actually would feel guiltier, but they anticipate that they would feel guiltier

if they were cynical towards an individual than a collective.