Being Better but Not Smarter than Others: The Muhammad Ali Effect at Work in Iterpersonal Situations

Allison, Messick, and Goethals have recently shown that people see themselves as more likely to perform desirable behaviors and less likely to perform undesirable behaviors than others and that this effect is stronger for fair/unfair (moral/immoral) than intelligent/unintelligent behaviors. The present study examined the generality of this so-called Muhammad Ali effect by using a substantially different methodology focusing on Judgments of interpersonal behaviors. Subjects were asked to write a story about their own typical behavior that had influenced another person and a story about another person's typical behavior that had influenced the subjects themselves. After completion of each story, subjects were asked to judge those behaviors in terms of morality (goodness) and intelligence. Consistent with the Muhammad Ali effect described by Allison and associates, it was found that subjects judged their own behavior as more desirable than the other's behavior, and significantly more so in terms of morality than in terms of intelligence. The discussion describes and evaluates some explanations for the Muhammad Ali effect.