Post Hoc Construction of Self-Performance and Other Performance in Self-Serving Social Comparison

Making self-serving social comparisons of performance depends on the freedom with which we can construct post hoc estimates of our own performance and that of comparison others. Three studies test the counterintuitive hypothesis that we make the most self-serving comparisons when (a) it is easy to construct our own standing on a dimension (in a positive direction) and (b) the standing of comparison others is relatively fixed (thus not easily...