The Uniqueness Bias: Studies of Constructive Social Comparison

In this chapter we report a number of studies of what we call the uniqueness bias, the tendency for people to underestimate the proportion of people who can or will perform socially desirable actions. Past research has found that people underestimate the proportion of people who will play a prisoner’s dilemma game cooperatively, and this underestimation is characteristic of both cooperators and competitors (Goethals, 1986a). Both groups see cooperative behavior as socially desirable and as considerably more unusual or unique than it actually is. That is, cooperative people see their own cooperative behavior as special or unique at the same time that competitors see cooperation in others as rare and their own…