Illusory superiority

Illusory superiority (also known as better-than-average effect) is a cognitive bias in which people overestimate the degree to which they possess desirable qualities, relative to others, or underestimate their negative qualities relative to others. It is one of a class of positive illusions. Whereas in optimism bias people overestimate the likelihood of favorable events happening to them, in illusory superiority people have inflated views of their own characteristics.

The effect has been found when people compare themselves to others on many different abilities and personality traits. Some surveys have found all, or nearly all, the participants rating themselves as above the group average. This has been named the Lake Wobegon effect after Garrison Keillor's fictional town where "all the children are above average".

The strongest effect has been found when people rate themselves on abilities at which they are totally incompetent. These subjects have the greatest disparity between their actual performance (at the low end of the distribution) and their self-rating (placing themselves above average). This Dunning–Kruger effect is interpreted as a lack of metacognitive ability to recognise their own incompetence.

Naming

The term "illusory superiority" was first used by Van Yperen and Buunk in 1991. Other terms used for the same phenomenon include "superiority bias", "the above-average effect", "leniency error", "sense of relative superiority" and the "primus inter pares (first among equals) effect".

Demonstration

In 1976 the College Board attached a survey to the SAT exams taken by approximately one million students. It asked the students to rate themselves relative to the rest of the sample on a number of vague but positive characteristics. For "leadership ability", 70% put themselves in the top 50%. For "ability to get on well with others", 85% put themselves in the top 50% and 25% in the top 1%.

In a 2002 study, students compared themselves to friends or peers on positive attributes, such as being sensitive, punctual or well read and on negative attributes such as being inconsistent, naïve or impractical. Subjects described themselves more favorably than their friends and their friends more favorably than other peers. The effect was greater the more ambiguous the attribute, and was greater for subjects with high self-esteem. In a similar survey, 87% of MBA students at Stanford University rated their academic performance as above the median.

In a survey of faculty at the University of Nebraska, 68% rated themselves in the top 25% for teaching ability.

Interpreting comparisons

For illusory superiority to be demonstrated by social comparison, two logical hurdles have to be overcome.

Some psychological experiments require subjects to compare themselves to an "average" peer. If we interpret the "average" as the mean, then it is logically possible for nearly all of the set to be above average, if the distribution of abilities is highly skewed. That is why there are experiments (such as the SAT test survey above) comparing subjects to the median of the peer group, since by definition it is impossible for most of the set to do better than the median.

A further problem in drawing a conclusion of inconsistency is that subjects might interpret the question in different ways, so it is logically possible that a majority of them are, for example, more generous than the rest of the group on their own understanding of generosity. This interpretation is confirmed by experiments which varied the amount of interpretive freedom subjects were given. As subjects evaluate themselves on a specific, well-defined attribute, illusory superiority remains.

Kruger and Dunning experiments

Main article: Dunning-Kruger effect

Kruger and Dunning gave subjects specific tasks (logic, grammar and telling funny from unfunny jokes). Subjects had to judge how well they had done on these tasks, relative to the rest of the group. This enabled a direct comparison of their real and believed ranks. For analysis, the results were divided into four groups, depending on actual task scores.

All groups put themselves above average. This meant that the lowest-scoring group (the bottom 25%) showed a very large illusory superiority. Although their test scores were in the 12.5^th percentile on average, they estimated themselves to be in the 62^nd. Kruger and Dunning explained that those who were worst at the tasks were also worst at recognising skill in those tasks. This was supported by the fact that, given training, the worst subjects improved their estimate of their rank as well as getting better at the tasks.

The paper, titled "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments," won a 2000 Ig Nobel prize.

In 2003 Dunning and Joyce Ehrlinger, also of Cornell University, published a study that detailed a shift in people's views of themselves influenced by external cues. Participants in the study (Cornell University undergraduates) were given tests of their knowledge of geography, some intended to positively affect their self-views, some intended to affect them negatively. They were then asked to rate their performance, and those given the positive tests reported significantly better performance than those given the negative.

Daniel Ames and Lara Kammrath extended this work to sensitivity to others, and the subjects' perception of how sensitive they were. Work by Burson Larrick and Joshua Klayman has suggested that the effect is not so obvious and may be due to noise and bias levels.

Dunning, Kruger, and coauthors' latest paper on this subject comes to qualitatively similar conclusions after making some attempt to test alternative explanations.

In driving ability

Swenson (1981) surveyed students in Sweden and the United States, asking them to compare their driving safety and skill to the other people in the experiment. For driving skill, almost all of the US sample (93%) and 69% of the Swedish sample put themselves in the top 50%. For safety, 88% of the US group and 77% of the Swedish sample put themselves in the top 50%.

McCormick et al. (1986) asked subjects to evaluate themselves on eight different dimensions of driving skill, such as the "dangerous-safe" dimension or the "considerate-inconsiderate" dimension. Out of 178 subjects, only a tiny minority of responses were below average and for some of the measures, large majorities rated themselves as above average. Taking the eight dimensions together, just under 80% of the subjects put themselves above the average driver.

In intelligence – the Downing Effect

The Downing effect describes the tendencies of people with below average intelligence quotients (IQs) to overestimate their intelligence, and of people with above average intelligence to underestimate their intelligence. The propensity to predictably misjudge one's own intelligence was first noted by C. L. Downing who conducted the first cross cultural studies on perceived intelligence. His studies also evidenced that the ability to accurately estimate others' intelligence was proportional to one's own intelligence. This means the lower the IQ score of an individual, the less capably he or she can appreciate and accurately appraise others' intelligence. The lower someone’s IQ, the more likely he is to rate himself as more intelligent than those around him. Conversely, people with a high IQ, while better at appraising others' intelligence overall, are still likely to rate people of similar intelligence as themselves as having higher IQs.

The disparity between actual IQ and perceived IQ has also been noted between genders by British psychologist Adrian Furnham. Men are prone to overestimate their intelligence by around 5 points while women are likely to underestimate their IQ by a similar proportion.

In popularity

Zuckerman & Jost (2001) gave students a detailed survey about their friendships with other students. It also asked them to assess their own popularity. By using social network analysis, they were able to show that the students generally had exaggerated perceptions of their own popularity, particularly in comparison to their own friends.

Illusory immunity to bias

Main article: Bias blind spot

Subjects describe themselves in positive terms compared to other people, and this includes describing themselves as less susceptible to bias than other people. This effect is called the Bias blind spot and has been demonstrated independently.

In non-social contexts

The better-than-average effect may not have wholly social origins: judgements about inanimate objects suffer similar distortions

Relation to mental health

Main article: Depressive realism

Psychology has traditionally assumed that generally accurate self-perceptions are essential to good mental health. This was challenged by a 1988 paper by Taylor and Brown, who argued that mentally healthy individuals typically manifest three cognitive illusions, namely illusory superiority, illusion of control and optimism bias. This idea rapidly became very influential, with some authorities concluding that it would be therapeutic to deliberately induce these biases. Since then, further research has both undermined that conclusion and offered new evidence associating superiority bias with negative effects on the individual.

One line of argument was that in the Taylor and Brown paper, the classification of people as mentally healthy or unhealthy was based on self-reports rather than objective criteria. Hence it was not surprising that people prone to self-enhancement would exaggerate how well-adjusted they are. One study claimed that "mentally normal" groups were contaminated by defensive deniers who are the most subject to positive illusions. A longitudinal study found that self-enhancement biases were associated with poor social skills and psychological maladjustment. In a separate experiment where videotaped conversations between men and women were rated by independent observers, self-enhancing individuals were more likely to show socially problematic behaviors such as hostility or irritability. A 2007 study found that self-enhancement biases were associated with psychological benefits (such as subjective well-being) but also inter- and intra-personal costs (such as anti-social behavior).

See also

• Anosognosia
• Crank (person)
• Fundamental attribution error
• Impostor syndrome
• List of cognitive biases
• Pollyanna principle
• Psychological immune system
• Self-efficacy
• Self-serving bias
• Valence effect

Further reading

• Alicke, M. D., & Govorun, O. (2005). The better-than-average effect. In Alicke, M. D., D. A. Dunning & J. I. Krueger, The Self in Social Judgment New York: Psychology Press. (ISBN 978-1-84169-418-4)
• Kruger, J. (1999). Lake Wobegon be gone! The "below-average effect" and the egocentric nature of comparative ability judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 221-232.
• E. E. Giladi & Y. Klar (2002). "When standards are wide of the mark: Nonselective superiority and inferiority biases in comparative judgments of objects and concepts". Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. 131: 538–551. doi:10.1037/0096-3445.131.4.538.

References

• Alicke, Mark D. (2005). The Self in Social Judgment. Psychology Press. pp. 85–106. ISBN 978-1-84169-418-4. {{cite book}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help) especially chapters 5 and 4
• Kruger, J. (1999). Lake Wobegon be gone! The "below-average effect" and the egocentric nature of comparative ability judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 221-232.
• Matlin, Margaret W. (2004). "Pollyanna Principle". In Rüdiger Pohl (ed.). Cognitive Illusions: a handbook on fallacies and biases in thinking, judgement and memory. Psychology Press. ISBN 978-1-84169-351-4.
• Myers, David G. (1980). The inflated self: human illusions and the Biblical call to hope. New York: Seabury Press. ISBN 9780816404599
• Sedikides, Constantine; Aiden P. Gregg. (2003). "Portraits of the Self" in Sage handbook of social psychology

Further reading

• Dunning, David (2003). "Why people fail to recognize their own incompetence". Current Directions in Psychological Science. 12 (3): 83–87. doi:10.1111/1467-8721.01235. {{cite journal}}: Unknown parameter |coauthors= ignored (|author= suggested) (help)

External links

• Unskilled and Unaware of It, blog post by Alan Bellows, DamnInteresting.com