False-Uniqueness Effect

The false-uniqueness effect is an attributional cognitive bias in social psychology describing how people tend to see their own qualities, traits and attributes as more unique than they actually are. It is typically measured by comparing a person's estimate of how many of their peers share a given trait or behavior against the actual proportion who report it, and studies have repeatedly found that people rate themselves as better drivers, less prejudiced, or more hardworking on group projects than they actually are relative to others, an effect that persists even for desirable actions: people tend to believe they would help a person having a staged seizure even when most people, in the actual experiment, did not. The false-uniqueness effect is the converse of the false consensus effect, in which people overestimate how typical their own attitudes and behavior are; both are linked to self-esteem, with people tending to apply the false-uniqueness effect to their desirable traits and the false consensus effect to justify their less desirable ones.