Bias in the Relative Assessment of Happiness, Political Stance, Height and Weight

Eugenio Proto and Daniel Sgroi

No 270995, Economic Research Papers from University of Warwick - Department of Economics

Abstract: Cognitive biases have been a recognised feature of research into human behaviour since at least Kahneman and Tversky’s ground‐breaking work of the 1970s. We find that such biases extend into the realm of perceptions about relative happiness and we compare and contrast this phenomenon across three other characteristics: height, weight and political stance. Our findings indicate a powerful and consistent bias in the way individuals perceive their place in the population distribution. In particular, those at extremes perceive a population distribution that is incorrectly and heavily biased towards themselves, irrespective of whether the characteristic is objective and easily observed or not.

Keywords: Financial; Economics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 14
Date: 2010-09-07
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/270995/files/twerp_943.pdf (application/pdf)
https://ageconsearch.umn.edu/record/270995/files/twerp_943.pdf?subformat=pdfa (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Bias in the Relative Assessment of Happiness,Political Stance, Height and Weight (2010)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ags:uwarer:270995

DOI: 10.22004/ag.econ.270995

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Economic Research Papers from University of Warwick - Department of Economics
Bibliographic data for series maintained by AgEcon Search ().