Most people are better judges of the moral character of others than they are of their own, Cornell University psychologists report.
Most people are better judges of other people's moral character than they are of their own.
Participants in the survey consistently tended to overestimate their own generosity, but actually were quite accurate when predicting the generous behavior of others, according to Nicholas Epley, a graduate student of psychology, and David Dunning, a professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences at Cornell. As it turns out, we don't know as much about our own moral nature as we know about others'. Each experiment asked college students at Cornell to predict how they would behave when faced with one of several moral dilemmas, and to make the same predictions for their peers. Again and again, people predicted that they would be more generous and kind than others. Yet when the time came to put their money where their mouths were, most kept their wallet in their pockets.