Chambers, J. R., Epley, N., Savitsky, K., Windschitl, P. D. (in press). Knowing too much: Using private knowledge to predict how one is viewed by others. Psychological Science

People have more information about themselves than others do, and this fundamental asymmetry can help to explain why individuals have difficulty accurately intuiting how they appear in the eyes of others. Determining how one appears to observers requires utilizing public information that is available to observers but disregarding private information that observers do not possess. We show in a series of experiments, however, that people utilize privately known information about their own past performances (Experiments 1 and 2), the performances of others (Experiment 3), and imaginary performances (Experiment 4) when intuiting how they are viewed by others. This tendency can help explain why people's beliefs about how they are judged by others often diverge from how they are actually judged.