Are frogs more forgiving than acorns anticipate? How response pressure confounds can generate (apparent) biases in...

Much research suggests that people are remarkably poor at understanding how others judge them, particularly regarding the impact of their actions on others. People appear to succumb to a host of nominally distinct biases that take a similar form: They overestimate how harshly they will be judged for bad actions and underestimate how positively they will be judged for good actions. In this article, we demonstrate that these biases can arise from "response pressure" confounds that are baked into how metaperceptions are typically studied. Specifically, we show that socially appropriate responses differ between those asked to predict how another person will feel about their actions and those asked to report how they feel about another person's actions. Predicting that someone will feel extremely grateful for your good deed is less appropriate than reporting that you are extremely grateful for someone else's good deed, while predicting that someone will feel extremely upset for your minor transgression is more appropriate than reporting that you are extremely upset at someone else's minor transgression. So if some participants provide inauthentic but socially appropriate responses, apparent biases will emerge, even if they do not exist. Across 13 preregistered studies, we show that differences in response pressures between predicting "how others will judge me" versus reporting "how I would judge others" can generate apparent biases and produce fanciful ones, such as people overestimating how negatively a frog would judge them if they were an acorn that fell on its head. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).