Research has shown that people perceive themselves as less biased than others, and as better than average in many favorable characteristics. We suggest that these types of biased perceptions regarding intentions and behavior of others may directly affect people’s decisions. In the current research we focus on possible influences in the context of helping behavior. In four experiments we found that, people believe that others, compared to themselves, are less inclined to help and cooperate, are less aware of the number of bystanders and more influenced by the “proportion dominance” bias and by the “identifiable victim effect.” We demonstrate that these perceptions are naïve and unrealistic by showing that decisions from both self and others’ perspectives are equally biased. Finally, we show how the perspective from which a decision is made (self vs. others) may affect private as well as public decisions in ways that might not be in the best interest of the decision maker and the public.

Compassion shown towards victims often decreases as the number of individuals in need of aid increases, identifiability of the victims decreases, and the proportion of victims helped shrinks. Such “compassion fade” may hamper individual-level and collective responses to pressing large-scale crises. To date, research on compassion fade has focused on humanitarian challenges; thus, it remains unknown whether and to what extent compassion fade emerges when victims are non-human others. Here we show that compassion fade occurs in the environmental domain, but only among non-environmentalists. These findings suggest that compassion fade may challenge our collective ability and willingness to confront the major environmental problems we face, including climate change. The observed moderation effect of environmental identity further indicates that compassion fade may present a significant psychological barrier to building broad public support for addressing these problems. Our results highlight the importance of bringing findings from the field of judgment and decision making to bear on pressing societal issues.