The disconnect emerged when Freeman asked participants to rate their own niceness (some of them included randomly selected Monarch staff; the airline must have been hugely relieved to learn they were nicer than average folk). He then asked them to respond to questions designed to establish objective agreeability (eg, do you give directions to strangers; donate blood). “There is an obvious social desirability in people, to think of themselves as nice, but it is not as simple as that,” Freeman says. When asked to identify the unaltered images, people tended to select the enhanced version of themselves. “Only among the women,” Mayo says from Madrid.

Source: The Guardian March 13, 2017 15:45 UTC