People typically provide overly optimistic social comparisons when rating their competence relative to their peers. Previous work has shown that poor performers overestimate their performances the most because their incompetence deprives them of the skills needed to recognize their deficits....

The traditional view of satiation is that repeated consumption produces an unavoidable decline in liking according to the quantity and recency of consumption. We challenge this deterministic view by showing that satiation is instead partially constructed in the moment based on contextual cues....

We develop a model of fragile self-esteem — self-esteem that is vulnerable to objectively unjustified swings — and study its implications for choices that depend on, or are aimed to protect, one's self-view. We assume that a person's self-esteem is determined by sampling from his store of...