Would I bet on beating you? Subtly increasing other-focus helps overcome egocentrism.

Two studies investigated egocentrism in competitive situations. Specifically, the aim was to test novel subtle debiasing techniques for the shared-circumstance effect whereby people bet more money on winning in easy than difficult knowledge quizzes. In Study 1, participants took part in a quiz competition with a friend. Being asked to complete 10 sentence stems about the opponent eliminated the shared-circumstance effect, compared to completing 10 sentences about the self. In Study 2, circling third-person pronouns in an unrelated task eliminated the shared-circumstance effect compared to circling first-person pronouns. The research is the first to show that subtly directing attention to the opponent or to a generic third person can eliminate egocentrism effects.