The tendency for people to evaluate themselves more favorably than the average peer, or, the better-than-average effect (BTAE), is one of social psychology's most reliable findings. The present research deconstructs the BTAE to address two questions which remain conspicuously unanswered in the literature. The first concerns the extent to which the BTAE is a motivationally driven phenomenon. Previous explanations for the effect have debated the extent to which self-enhancement motives underlie self versus average peer comparative judgments. The present studies inform this inconsistency by showing that the BTAE contains both motivational and perceptual-cognitive components. Specifically, it is argued that the effect results from an anchoring-and-adjustment process whereby judgments of the average peer are anchored on, and assimilated toward the self, and that enhancement motives impact the degree to which this assimilation occurs. For trait dimensions on which the self is positively evaluated, enhancement motives limit the amount of average peer assimilation that occurs (Study 1). But for those dimensions on which the self is negatively evaluated, enhancement motives augment average peer assimilation (Study 2).
Secondly, the present research also explores the question of how judgments of self are derived in contexts typical of those employed in BTAE research. Particularly, it is argued that self judgment is a heuristic-driven process by which people naturally, and perhaps automatically conflate self description with idiosyncratic prescription of how much of various traits an individual should have. Study 3 demonstrates that when made absolutely, self judgments and idiosyncratic ideal conceptions are nearly identical across trait dimensions. Moreover, Studies 3 and 4 provide converging evidence that this extreme similarity may result from the presence of a negotiation process during self and ideal judgment, in which it is conferred how the self rates relative to one's ideal standards, and, how such standards relate to present self standing. Discussion focuses on implications for existing perspectives a well as directions for future research.