Self and social judgments of ability: beyond distributional information

In a given domain, low-skill individuals typically evaluate the ability level of other people more favorably than high-skill individuals. The current study tests whether this tendency continues to occur even when people have unambiguous distributional information available through which to judge others. Students received distributional information detailing their percentile rank in a statistics course and the percentile rank of another student in the course. Then, students were asked to evaluate their own and the other students' statistics ability. Students evaluated the other person's ability more favorably when their own rank in the course was low rather than high. Therefore, people may use themselves as a standard of comparison when they judge others even when more diagnostic sources of information are available.