These posts make more sense when read in order.
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I’m so happy because today
I’ve found my friends
They’re in my head
—from the Nirvana song “Lithium”
Self-delusion can come in other forms. Men, on average, tend to overestimate their intelligence and attractiveness, while women tend to underestimate theirs.[1] Overall, psychologists have found we’re poor judges of our own abilities, and those with the worst abilities, overestimated them the most. This last bit is called the Dunning-Kruger effect. It’s the ignorance of ignorance.
When two researchers from the University of Washington interviewed 50 people who were in the hospital from vehicle accidents that most of them had caused, almost all of them insisted they were near expert drivers. These were accidents where they had received multiple injuries and more than half of the vehicles were written off as unrepairable. The researchers often had to wait for their subjects to regain consciousness before surveying them. These people also had more traffic citations than the control group, who also rated themselves as near expert drivers. A few had been banned from driving or had failed driving tests. Six had killed someone in their accident, yet they insisted they were great drivers.[2]
Another study found that 25% of their subjects wildly exaggerated their abilities, while only about 25% were fairly realistic in their assessment.[3]
Interestingly, the Dunning-Kruger effect seems to be a feature of Western cultures, and is not found in Asian ones, perhaps because they value self-improvement over self-esteem.
Overconfidence, on the other hand, seems to be everywhere. There are many studies that confirm this common bias, but one I particularly like was where researchers asked prisoners to rate themselves on the positive social qualities of self-control, trustworthiness, honesty, dependability, kindness, generosity, compassion, morality, and law abidingness. The convicts all rated themselves as above average on all of them, except they said they were average on law abidingness.[4]
Among college professors, 94% considered themselves above average, with two-thirds placing themselves in the top 25%, which is impossible since most would be about average, with some well below average.[5] Studies have found that—depending on the study—between 70% and 95% of drivers, from beginners to the elderly, rate themselves as being better than average.
As an aside, I’d like to note that young and old drivers appear to get a bad rap. One study found that the crash rate of teens was the same as for those in their twenties, while the rates for those over seventy were 1.4 times lower than those in their fifties.[6] But that has nothing to do with how people rate their abilities.
One more thing: It’s often said that teens think they know everything, but in my experience this applies just as well to most adults, and it seems to get worse with age. I hope someone will do a study on this. It’s probably fair to say that most people would agree with humor columnist Harold Coffin’s statement, “The fellow who thinks he knows it all is especially annoying to those of us who do.”[7]
Overconfidence has been found in business leaders, doctors, and pilots, among many others. About the only people who don’t seem to overrate themselves are those suffering from depression.
Part of this discrepancy is because we lack a proper frame of reference for comparison, so we can get away with being overconfident. If you’re a terrible ice skater or boxer, you’re going to be quickly reminded of it every time you try.
When it comes to people in important positions, such as surgeons, pilots, and military leaders, overconfidence can have disastrous results. Unfortunately for us, people prefer politicians who project confidence, but studies have found the most incompetent individuals are even more confident in their abilities than are the actual experts, so it shouldn’t be surprising if we end up with the most incompetent leaders.
Similar to overconfidence and the Dunning-Kruger effect is the superiority illusion, which is where people are convinced they’re better than others. This is usually the basis of racism, but in its milder form it causes people to think they’re more popular than most of their friends.
You see yourself in the mirror every day. You have a good idea of your appearance. What you don’t know is how your appearance compares to that of other people. Behavioral scientist Nicholas Epley with the University of Chicago was surprised as to how far off people’s perceptions of themselves are. This prompted him to say, “When we ask people to rate how attractively they will be rated by somebody else and correlate it with actual ratings of attractiveness, we find no correlation. Zero! This still shocks me. For crying out loud, you ought to get some sense of whether you're hot or not. But it seems not.”[8]
But these biases don’t just apply to one’s self. About 95% rate their partners as above average in attractiveness, friendliness, intelligence, and humor. And we all know that parents rate their children as being much more advanced, intelligent, and cuter than other people’s progeny.
At the other end of the spectrum are those who underrate their abilities, which in more extreme cases is known as the Impostor Phenomenon, where the person feels like they’re pretending to be competent, when it’s actually their doubts that make them feel that way. These people live in fear that they’ll be exposed. And they feel like that in spite of their successes and superior achievements.[9]
Of course self-deception can take many other forms, such as when someone convinces his or herself that missing a few mortgage payments isn’t putting their house at risk, or denies the ill effects of not paying off credit card debt for years. And they are convinced that it’s not their fault.
We are all very good at deceiving ourselves. We usually think we know a lot more than we actually do, but when we try to explain something in detail, like how breathing works or how trees grow, we suddenly find we’re short on details. This is called illusion of explanatory depth. And, oddly, the more you learn, the more you realize how much you don’t know.[10]
This paradox is actually how you can gain a more realistic view of the world. As you learn, you realize how little you knew before and how much you still don’t know. And for most people, the more educated you become, the less superior you feel. Gaining knowledge can even wipe out the Dunning-Kruger effect. But it probably won’t reveal to you whether you’re hot or not.
So how much do biases affect our view of the world? It’s hard to say, since some people have more biases than others and some biases are stronger in some and weaker in others. What we know is that we all have them and we usually don’t know it. And there are more than a hundred of them. Clearly some people have a more realistic view of things than others, but we’re all affected by them and they do color our world.
Click here for the next article in this series:
[1] Joseph T. Hallinan, Why We Make Mistakes, New York: Broadway Books, 2009, p. 135. See also pp. 58-59.
[2] C.E. Preston and S. Harris, “Psychology of drivers in traffic accidents”, Journal of Applied Psychology, vol. 49, no. 4, 1965, pp. 284-288, https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2Fh0022453, https://doi.org/10.1037/h0022453.
[3] Steve Ayan, “10 Things You Don't Know about Yourself”, Scientific American, May 15, 2018, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/10-things-you-dont-know-about-yourself/.
[4] C. Sedikides, R. Meek, M.D. Alicke, and S. Taylor, “Behind bars but above the bar: Prisoners consider themselves more prosocial than non-prisoners”, British Journal of Social Psychology. 2013, https://doi.org/10.1111/bjso.12060.
And University of Southampton, “Prisoners believe they are just as law abiding as non-prisoners”, Phys Org, January 9. 2014, https://phys.org/news/2014-01-prisoners-law-non-prisoners.html.
[5] K. Patricia Cross, “Not can, but will college teaching be improved?”, vol. 1977, no. 17, Spring 1977, pp. 1-15, https://doi.org/10.1002/he.36919771703.
[6] Jonathan J. Rolison, Salissou Moutari, Paul J. Hewson, and Elizabeth Hellier, “Overestimated Crash Risks of Young and Elderly Drivers”, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, vol. 46, no. 1, January 2014, pp. 58-64, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0749379713005230, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.amepre.2013.08.014.
[7] Harold Coffin, filler item, The Saturday Evening Post, May 6, 1961, p. 93.
[8] Graham Lawton, “The grand delusion”, New Scientist, May 14, 2011, no. 2812, pp. 35-41, and as “The grand delusion: Why nothing is as it seems”, http://www.newscientist.com/special/the-grand-delusion.
[9] Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg, “Impostor Phenomenon: When self-doubt gets the upper hand”, ScienceDaily, June 9, 2022. www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/06/220609155726.htm, citing Kay Brauer and René T. Proyer, “The Impostor Phenomenon and causal attributions of positive feedback on intelligence tests”, Personality and Individual Differences, 2022; 194: 111663, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2022.111663.
[10] Tom Stafford, “The best way to win an argument”, BBC Future, May 21, 2014, https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20140521-the-best-way-to-win-an-argument.
Also Jessica Schmerler, “You Don’t Know as Much as You Think: False Expertise”, Scientific American Mind, January 1, 2016, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/you-don-t-know-as-much-as-you-think-false-expertise/.
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