Read more: “The grand delusion: Why nothing is as it seems“
How’s your driving? If you are anything like the average person, you probably think it is pretty good. One study found that 74 per cent of drivers believed themselves to be better than average behind the wheel. And, perversely, those who had been in a crash were slightly more confident about their abilities than drivers who had not been.
This, of course, does not reflect reality. Unless there are a handful of truly dreadful drivers, not everybody can be better than average. And yet if you ask people to rate themselves on almost any positive trait – competence, intelligence, honesty, originality, friendliness, reliability and many others – most put themselves in the better-than-average category. Ask them similar questions about negative traits and they will rate themselves as less likely than average to possess them.
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This egotistic illusion has been imaginatively dubbed the “better-than-average effect”. It is incredibly pervasive, yet goes largely unnoticed. In an ironic twist, most people believe themselves to be more resistant than average to having an inflated opinion of themselves.
We also inflate our opinions of loved ones. Around 95 per cent of people rate their partner as smarter, more attractive, warmer and funnier than average. And as anyone who has endured a 30-something dinner party will testify, parents almost universally rate their children as cleverer, cuter and more developmentally advanced than their peers.
The better-than-average effect is just one of a number of positive illusions – ways we kid ourselves that we are special. Another is optimism bias, a well-established effect characterised by unrealistic expectations about the future. Most people expect to live longer, healthier and more successful lives than average while underestimating their chances of getting divorced, falling ill or having an accident. And the more (or less) desirable the outcome, the stronger people believe it will (or won’t) happen to them.
Where do such illusions come from? According to at the University of Washington in Seattle, one of the originators of the theory of positive illusions, it all starts in childhood. “Parents create them by fawning over their children,” he says.
The fawning doesn’t stop there. Throughout life, we have an innate tendency to divide the world into “us” and “them”. As soon as you forge a connection with someone, you become part of their in-group – and humans are hard-wired to see members of their in-group more positively than they see others. In this way we all sign up to various mutual appreciation societies that exaggerate our virtues, ignore our faults and look down on outsiders. No wonder most of us feel excessively positive about ourselves.
Far from being pathological, though, positive illusions are now viewed as being a marker of a healthy mind. People who don’t harbour them are more likely to be clinically depressed – a state called depressive realism.
But however deluded you are about yourself, chances are you are even more so about how you think others perceive you.
Everybody wonders and worries about how they come across to others, and most of us think we have a pretty good handle on it. But we don’t. “People are nowhere near as good at it as they think,” says , a behavioural scientist at the University of Chicago.
That is not to say we are completely useless. If you think of yourself as generous, for example, other people probably do too. Just not quite to the extent you might like.
From moment to moment, however, we are surprisingly poor at intuiting how we are coming across. This is largely down to something called the “spotlight effect” – the deluded belief that everything you do and say is being closely observed and scrutinised. “Because we’re so aware of ourselves it can be easy to think that others are noticing us when they’re not,” says Epley.
As a result, we blow everything out of proportion. “Say you spill water on yourself so it looks like you peed your pants,” says Epley. “You assume everyone is going to notice. But they don’t, because the world doesn’t really revolve around you.” People also assume that their emotional states are broadcast to all and sundry when in fact they are largely invisible.
It also works the other way. If you do or say something you think is especially clever or admirable, you’re likely to overestimate the extent to which other people will notice. Most of the time they won’t even register because they are too busy tending to their own ego.
The central problem is that you know yourself too well. “You’re an expert on yourself,” says Epley. “That means you notice all kinds of subtle things about yourself that others simply don’t. They see general characteristics.”
This is compounded by the fact that we have difficulty guessing what other people are thinking. “We have imperfect tools for getting into their minds,” says Epley. “We watch their faces and behaviour and try to get some sense of what they’re thinking, but behaviour doesn’t always reflect attitudes very well.”
Surprisingly, our lack of insight doesn’t disappear when we’re around people we know well: accuracy does go up, but only slightly. There is even evidence that your ability to read the mind of your spouse actually drops after the first year of marriage. “People are actually better at knowing how well they’re communicating with a stranger. You believe you know your partner very well as you spend more time together, but this can actually create more of an illusion of insight than actual insight,” says Epley.
Perhaps the area where we have the least insight is physical appearance. Everybody knows what they look like, but when it comes to judging how we look, we’re absolutely hopeless. For example, if you ask people to locate a photograph of themselves in a sea of faces they find it faster if it has been morphed to look more attractive, suggesting we all think we’re better looking than we actually are.
“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,” says Epley. “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.”
“You ought to have some sense of whether you’re hot or not. But it seems you don’t”
Read more: “The grand delusion: Why nothing is as it seems“
