People tend to believe situations that favour them are fair, while favouring others in a similar way would be unfair. This can cause us to feel entitled to more than others when it comes to splitting positive outcomes, like profits, or to feel the opposite when splitting negative outcomes, like blame. Any parent of two or more children would be able to provide countless anecdotes in support of this finding. To demonstrate this effect more objectively, Ken'ichiro Tanaka performed a study in 1993 wherein subjects wrote down fair and
unfair behaviours that were performed by themselves or by others.
In Tanaka's study on perceived fairness, it was found that women were more likely to consider others' perspectives and the correlation between "I" and "other" sentences was less pronounced. In addition, a person's predisposition to the egocentric bias may be affected by the number of languages that she speaks.
As a study conducted by Wimmer and Perner illustrates, the egocentric bias can be a problem when it causes us to assume others have a similar viewpoint to our own or to completely ignore others' perspectives. In the study, a child and a stuffed animal were placed in front of two boxes, labelled A and B, and a special item was placed in box A. The stuffed animal was then taken out of the room. Next, the child watched as the special item was moved to box B. The child was then asked, "If the stuffed animal were searching for the special item, where would he look?" Overwhelmingly, the child subject pointed to box B, even though the stuffed animal had not "seen" that the item had been moved. This study shows that we have a natural tendency to assume that others share the same information and perspective that we do.
One study conducted by Jerald Greenberg was based on the hypothesis that confronting one's own image in a mirror would raise one's self-awareness level and result in less egocentric bias. The subjects were given a situation in which they did the same amount of work as another but were paid more. Subjects without a mirror tended to state that the situation was fairer than if the same payment were made to another, displaying classic signs of egocentric bias. On the other hand, the effect was entirely erased when students were asked to look in a mirror as they made their statements. Entering a self-aware state
Questions
1. Women are less affected by the egocentric bias than men are.
2. Increasing one's level of self-awareness can mitigate egocentric bias.
3. We tend to assume situations that favour us are fair.
4. We assume that others share our perspective and information.