Moral Overconfidence: Immoral Actors’ Meta-Perceptions are Moderately Inaccurate and Overly Positive

Across two actor and four observer samples we assess actor-observer asymmetries and judgment accuracy in contexts of immoral behavior. We examine the motives immoral actors ascribe to their own behavior, whether immoral actors can accurately predict the moral motive attributions third-party observers will make of their behavior (meta- perception), and the extent to which observers can accurately predict the self-reported motives of immoral...