Choosing Differently But In the Same Way: How Self Impacts Beliefs about Others

We study how people’s own evaluation of choice options influences their estimates of other people’s evaluations when their choices are known. People draw a parallel between themselves and others based on the known choice, and conditionally project their own evaluations of the corresponding option. Thus, how a person rates the option she chose affects her estimates of how other’s rated the option they chose, regardless of whether it was the same option or the opposite option. Likewise, her rating of her rejected option affects her estimate of how others rated their own rejected option. Across five studies, we provide evidence of conditional projection in political and consumer decisions, using across-people differences in ratings of choice options, within-person changes in ratings, as well as manipulated differences in participants’ ratings. We show that conditional projection is facilitated by recognizing a similarity to others in how choices are made, demonstrate that existing accounts of projection would not directly predict our findings, and rule out alternative explanations based on reverse causation or a belief in negative correlations among evaluations.