Chambers, J. R., Epley,
N., Savitsky, K., Windschitl, P. D. (2008). Knowing too much: Using private
knowledge to predict how one is viewed by others. Psychological Science,
19, 542-548.
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 to other people. Determining how one appears to observers requires
one to utilize public information that is available to observers, but to disregard
private information that they do not possess. We report a series of experiments,
however, showing that people utilize privately known information about their
own past performance (Experiments 1 and 2), the performance of other people
(Experiment 3), and imaginary performance (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.