People report themselves to be above average on simple tasks and below average on difficult tasks. This paper builds on prior research demonstrating this effect and proposes a simpler explanation for it: that people easily conflate relative with absolute evaluation, especially on ambiguous measures of evaluation. The paper then presents a series of four studies that examine this conflation expl...

When parsimony ancestral character reconstruction is ambiguous, it is often resolved in favour of the more complex character state. Hence, secondary loss (secondary ‘‘absence’’) of a complex feature is favoured over parallel gains of that feature as this preserves the stronger hypothesis of homology. We believe that such asymmetry in character state complexity is important information for under...