Are Frogs More Forgiving Than Acorns Anticipate? How Response Pressure Confounds Can Generate (Apparent) Biases in Metaperceptions

Abstract: Research suggests that people are remarkably poor at understanding the impact of their actions on others. People appear to succumb to a host of distinct biases that take a similar form: They overestimate how harshly they will be judged for bad actions and underestimate how positively they will be judged for good actions. We demonstrate that these biases can arise from “response pressure” confounds that are baked into how metaperceptions are typically studied. We show that socially appropriate responses differ between those asked to predict how another person will feel about their actions and those asked to report how they feel about the action. These differences in response pressures between predicting “how others will judge me” vs. reporting “how I would judge others” can generate apparent biases and produce fanciful ones, such as people overestimating how negatively a frog would judge them, as an acorn, that fell on its head.

Keywords: metaperceptions, mispredictions, experiment, method, beliefs