Actor–observer differences in frequency-of-use estimates: Sometimes strangers know us better than ourselves

Abstract

People make optimistic predictions about themselves; they expect relationships to last longer, tasks to take less time, and things to turn out generally better than they will. In contrast, predictions about others are more realistic, but lack discriminatory power. We investigated first- and third-party predictions for holiday gifts, and how the actor's own prediction influences the observer's prediction. As expected, actors’ predictions were optimistic but showed discrimination, while observer accuracy depended on access to the actor's prediction. Observers who saw the actor's prediction showed no optimism but similar discrimination, while other observers showed an optimistic bias but no discrimination. These results suggest that predictions allow efficient use of an anchor-and-adjust strategy, while their absence leads observers to use projection.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 4 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.