Tehila Kogut

This study examines the development of children's self‐assessment of their prosociality in normative social comparisons with an average peer, who was either a concrete individual, or an abstract one, at a school of average socioeconomic level in south Israel ( N = 148, Age 6–12 years, 51% females; June 2021). Results show that older children exhibited the better‐than‐average (BTA) effect by perceiving themselves as more generous than their average peer. Conversely, younger children exhibited a worse‐than‐average effect , in that they assumed that their peers would act more generously than themselves (). Only the older children (aged 8 years onward) were significantly affected by the concreteness of the target of comparison by exhibiting the BTA effect only when the average peer was abstract (not concrete).