Maintaining Self-Serving Social Comparisons: Attenuating the Perceived Significance of Risk-Increasing Behaviors

Abstract

Unrealistic optimism about future events is due in part to the belief that one’s behavior is less risky than that of one’s peers. The current investigation explores strategies that people use to maintain this self-serving belief. In two studies, subjects were given information about their peers challenging the notion that their own frequencies of engaging in several risk-increasing behaviors were lower than average. Subjects responded by reducing their estimates of how often they engaged in these behaviors, and by rating the behaviors as less relevant to health outcomes and less personally important to avoid (relative to a control group). There was evidence in Study 1 that subjects were less likely to attenuate the significance of a behavior if they lowered their estimate of how often they engaged in that behavior, indicating that these strategies are at least partially substitutable. Subjects in Study 1 also distorted their memory so that their new attitudes about the risky behaviors seemed congruent with their pre-manipulation attitudes. Study 2 showed that giving subjects information portraying their peers as exceptionally healthy does not eliminate unrealistic optimism. Implications of these findings for research on optimistic biases, social comparison, and health intervention are discussed. Despite efforts to inform the public about lung disease, alcoholism, heart disease, and AIDS, a substantial portion of the population still smokes, drinks excessive alcohol, possesses a high fat diet, and engages in unsafe sex. Most people know at least some of the deleterious effects of these