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In the field of social psychology, illusory superiority is a condition of cognitive bias
wherein a person overestimates their own qualities and abilities, in
relation to the same qualities and abilities of other people. Illusory
superiority is one of many positive illusions, relating to the self, that are evident in the study of intelligence,
the effective performance of tasks and tests, and the possession of
desirable personal characteristics and personality traits.
Overestimation of abilities compared to an objective measure is known as
the overconfidence effect.
The term illusory superiority was first used by the researchers Van Yperen and Buunk, in 1991. The phenomenon is also known as the above-average effect, the superiority bias, the leniency error, the sense of relative superiority, the primus inter pares effect, and the Lake Wobegon effect, named after the fictional town where all the children are above average. The Dunning-Kruger effect is a form of illusory superiority shown by people on a task where their level of skill is low.
A vast majority of the literature on illusory superiority originates
from studies on participants in the United States. However, research
that only investigates the effects in one specific population is
severely limited as this may not be a true representation of human
psychology. More recent research investigating self-esteem in other countries suggests that illusory superiority depends on culture. Some studies indicate that East Asians tend to underestimate their own abilities in order to improve themselves and get along with others.
Explanations
Better-than-average heuristic
Alicke
and Govorun proposed the idea that, rather than individuals consciously
reviewing and thinking about their own abilities, behaviors and
characteristics and comparing them to those of others, it is likely that
people instead have what they describe as an "automatic tendency to
assimilate positively-evaluated social objects toward ideal trait
conceptions".
For example, if an individual evaluated themselves as honest, they
would be likely to then exaggerate their characteristic towards their
perceived ideal position on a scale of honesty. Importantly, Alicke
noted that this ideal position is not always the top of the scale; for
example, with honesty, someone who is always brutally honest may be
regarded as rude—the ideal is a balance, perceived differently by
different individuals.
Egocentrism
Another explanation for how the better-than-average effect works is
egocentrism. This is the idea that an individual places greater
importance and significance on their own abilities, characteristics, and
behaviors than those of others. Egocentrism is therefore a less overtly
self-serving bias. According to egocentrism, individuals will
overestimate themselves in relation to others because they believe that
they have an advantage that others do not have, as an individual
considering their own performance and another's performance will
consider their performance to be better, even when they are in fact
equal. Kruger (1999) found support for the egocentrism explanation in
his research involving participant ratings of their ability on easy and
difficult tasks. It was found that individuals were consistent in their
ratings of themselves as above the median in the tasks classified as
"easy" and below the median in the tasks classified as "difficult",
regardless of their actual ability. In this experiment the
better-than-average effect was observed when it was suggested to
participants that they would be successful, but also a worse-than-average effect was found when it was suggested that participants would be unsuccessful.
Focalism
Yet another explanation for the better-than-average effect is
"focalism", the idea that greater significance is placed on the object
that is the focus of attention. Most studies of the better-than-average
effect place greater focus on the self when asking participants to make
comparisons (the question will often be phrased with the self being
presented before the comparison target—"compare yourself to the average
person"). According to focalism this means that the individual will
place greater significance on their own ability or characteristic than
that of the comparison target. This also means that in theory if, in an
experiment on the better-than-average effect, the questions were phrased
so that the self and other were switched (e.g., "compare the average
peer to yourself") the better-than-average effect should be lessened.
Research into focalism has focused primarily on optimistic bias
rather than the better-than-average effect. However, two studies found a
decreased effect of optimistic bias when participants were asked to
compare an average peer to themselves, rather than themselves to an
average peer.
Windschitl, Kruger & Simms (2003) have conducted research
into focalism, focusing specifically on the better-than-average effect,
and found that asking participants to estimate their ability and
likelihood of success in a task produced results of decreased
estimations when they were asked about others' chances of success rather
than their own.
Noisy mental information processing
A 2012 Psychological Bulletin suggests that illusory superiority, as well as other biases, can be explained by an information-theoretic generative mechanism that assumes observation (a noisy conversion of objective evidence) into subjective estimates (judgment). The study suggests that the underlying cognitive mechanism is similar to the noisy mixing of memories that cause the conservatism bias or overconfidence:
re-adjustment of estimates of our own performance after our own
performance are adjusted differently than the re-adjustments regarding
estimates of others' performances. Estimates of the scores of others are
even more conservative (more influenced by the previous expectation)
than our estimates of our own performance (more influenced by the new
evidence received after giving the test). The difference in the
conservative bias of both estimates (conservative estimate of our own
performance, and even more conservative estimate of the performance of
others) is enough to create illusory superiority.
Since mental noise is a sufficient explanation that is much
simpler and more straightforward than any other explanation involving heuristics, behavior, or social interaction, the Occam's razor principle argues in its favor as the underlying generative mechanism (it is the hypothesis which makes the fewest assumptions).
Selective recruitment
Selective
recruitment is the notion that an individual selects their own
strengths and the other's weaknesses when making peer comparisons, in
order that they appear better on the whole. This theory was first tested
by Weinstein (1980); however, this was in an experiment relating to optimistic bias,
rather than the better-than-average effect. The study involved
participants rating certain behaviors as likely to increase or decrease
the chance of a series of life events happening to them. It was found
that individuals showed less optimistic bias when they were allowed to
see others' answers.
Perloff and Fetzer (1986) suggested that when making peer
comparisons on a specific characteristic, an individual chooses a
comparison target—the peer to whom he is being compared—with lower
abilities. To test this theory, Perloff and Fetzer asked participants to
compare themselves to specific comparison targets like a close friend,
and found that illusory superiority decreased when they were told to
envision a specific person rather than vague constructs like "the
average peer". However, these results are not completely reliable and
could be affected by the fact that individuals like their close friends
more than an "average peer" and may as a result rate their friend as
being higher than average, therefore the friend would not be an
objective comparison target.
"Self versus aggregate" comparisons
This
idea, put forward by Giladi and Klar, suggests that when making
comparisons any single member of a group will tend to evaluate
themselves to rank above that group's statistical mean performance level
or the median performance level of its members. For example, if an
individual is asked to assess their own skill at driving compared to the
rest of the group, they are likely to rate themself as an above-average
driver. Furthermore, the majority of the group is likely to rate
themselves as above average. Research has found this effect in many
different areas of human performance and has even generalized it beyond
individuals' attempts to draw comparisons involving themselves.
Findings of this research therefore suggest that rather than
individuals evaluating themselves as above average in a self-serving
manner, the better-than-average effect is actually due to a general
tendency to evaluate any single person or object as better than average.
Non-social explanations
The better-than-average effect may not have wholly social origins—judgments about inanimate objects suffer similar distortions.
Neuroimaging
The degree to which people view themselves as more desirable than the average person links to reduced activation in their orbitofrontal cortex and dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. This is suggested to link to the role of these areas in processing "cognitive control".
Effects in different situations
Illusory
superiority has been found in individuals' comparisons of themselves
with others in a variety of aspects of life, including performance in
academic circumstances (such as class performance, exams and overall
intelligence), in working environments (for example in job performance), and in social settings (for example in estimating one's popularity, or the extent to which one possesses desirable personality traits, such as honesty or confidence), and in everyday abilities requiring particular skill.
For illusory superiority to be demonstrated by social
comparison, two logical hurdles have to be overcome. One is the
ambiguity of the word "average". It is logically possible for nearly all
of the set to be above the mean if the distribution of abilities is highly skewed.
For example, the mean number of legs per human being is slightly lower
than two because some people have fewer than two and almost none have
more. Hence experiments usually compare subjects to the median of the peer group, since by definition it is impossible for a majority to exceed the median.
A further problem in inferring 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 each on "their own understanding" of generosity. This interpretation is confirmed by experiments
which varied the amount of interpretive freedom. As subjects evaluated
themselves on a specific, well-defined attribute, illusory superiority
remains.
Academic ability, job performance, lawsuits going to trial, and stock trading
In a survey of faculty at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, 68% rated themselves in the top 25% for teaching ability, and 94% rated themselves as above average.
In a similar survey, 87% of Master of Business Administration students at Stanford University rated their academic performance as above the median.
Illusory superiority has also explained phenomena such as the large amount of stock market trading (as each trader thinks they are the best, and most likely to succeed),
and the number of lawsuits that go to trial (because, due to illusory
superiority, many lawyers have an inflated belief that they will win a
case).
Cognitive tasks
In Kruger and Dunning's experiments, participants were given specific tasks (such as solving logic problems, analyzing grammar
questions, and determining whether jokes were funny), and were asked to
evaluate their performance on these tasks relative to the rest of the
group, enabling a direct comparison of their actual and perceived
performance.
Results were divided into four groups depending on actual
performance and it was found that all four groups evaluated their
performance as above average, meaning that the lowest-scoring group (the
bottom 25%) showed a very large illusory superiority bias. The
researchers attributed this to the fact that the individuals who were
worst at performing the tasks were also worst at recognizing 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 an Ig Nobel Prize in 2000.
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. Cornell undergraduates were given tests of
their knowledge of geography, some intended to positively affect their
self-views, others 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. Research by Burson, Larrick, and Klayman suggests 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.
Driving ability
Svenson (1981) surveyed 161 students in Sweden and the United States, asking them to compare their driving skills and safety
to other people's. For driving skills, 93% of the U.S. sample and 69%
of the Swedish sample put themselves in the top 50%; for safety, 88% of
the U.S. and 77% of the Swedish put themselves in the top 50%.
McCormick, Walkey and Green (1986) found similar results in their
study, asking 178 participants to evaluate their position on eight
different dimensions of driving skills (examples include the
"dangerous–safe" dimension and the "considerate–inconsiderate"
dimension). Only a small minority rated themselves as below the median,
and when all eight dimensions were considered together it was found that
almost 80% of participants had evaluated themselves as being an
above-average driver.
One commercial survey showed that 36% of drivers believed they were an above-average driver while texting or sending emails compared to other drivers; 44% considered themselves average, and 18% below average.
Health
Illusory superiority was found in a self-report study of health
behaviors (Hoorens & Harris, 1998) that asked participants to
estimate how often they and their peers carried out healthy and
unhealthy behaviors. Participants reported that they carried out healthy
behaviors more often than the average peer, and unhealthy behaviors
less often. The findings held even for expected future behavior.
Immunity to bias
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.
IQ
One of the main effects of illusory superiority in IQ
is the "Downing effect". This describes the tendency of people with a
below-average IQ to overestimate their IQ, and of people with an
above-average IQ to underestimate their IQ (similar trend to the Dunning-Kruger effect). This tendency was first observed by C. L. Downing, who conducted the first cross-cultural studies
on perceived intelligence. His studies also showed that the ability to
accurately estimate other people's IQs was proportional to one's own IQ
(i.e., the lower the IQ, the less capable of accurately appraising other
people's IQs). People with high IQs are better overall at appraising
other people's IQs, but when asked about the IQs of people with similar
IQs as themselves, they are likely to rate them as having higher
IQs.
The disparity between actual IQ and perceived IQ has also been noted between genders by British psychologist Adrian Furnham,
in whose work there was a suggestion that, on average, men are more
likely to overestimate their intelligence by 5 points, while women are
more likely to underestimate their IQ by a similar margin.
Memory
Illusory superiority has been found in studies comparing memory
self-reports, such as Schmidt, Berg & Deelman's research in older
adults. This study involved participants aged between 46 and 89 years of
age comparing their own memory to that of peers of the same age group,
25-year-olds and their own memory at age 25. This research showed that
participants exhibited illusory superiority when comparing themselves to
both peers and younger adults, however the researchers asserted that
these judgments were only slightly related to age.
Popularity
In Zuckerman and Jost's study, participants were given detailed questionnaires about their friendships and asked to assess their own popularity. Using social network analysis,
they were able to show that participants generally had exaggerated
perceptions of their own popularity, especially in comparison to their
own friends.
Despite the fact that most people in the study believed that they
had more friends than their friends, a 1991 study by sociologist Scott
L. Feld on the friendship paradox shows that on average, due to sampling bias, most people have fewer friends than their friends have.
Relationship happiness
Researchers
have also found illusory superiority in relationship satisfaction. For
example, one study found that participants perceived their own
relationships as better than others' relationships on average, but
thought that the majority of people were happy with their relationships.
It also found evidence that the higher the participants rated their own
relationship happiness, the more superior they believed their
relationship was—illusory superiority also increased their own
relationship satisfaction. This effect was pronounced in men, whose
satisfaction was especially related to the perception that one's own
relationship was superior as well as to the assumption that few others
were unhappy in their relationships. On the other hand, women's
satisfaction was particularly related to the assumption that most people
were happy with their relationship. One study found that participants became defensive
when their spouse or partner were perceived by others to be more
successful in any aspect of their life, and had the tendency to
exaggerate their success and understate their spouse or partner's
success.
Self, friends, and peers
One of the first studies that found illusory superiority was carried out in the United States by the College Board in 1976. A survey was attached to the SAT
exams (taken by one million students annually), asking the students to
rate themselves relative to the median of the sample (rather than the
average peer) on a number of vague positive characteristics. In ratings
of leadership,
70% of the students put themselves above the median. In ability to get
on well with others, 85% put themselves above the median; 25% rated
themselves in the top 1%.
A 2002 study on illusory superiority in social settings, with
participants comparing themselves to friends and other peers on positive
characteristics (such as punctuality and sensitivity) and negative
characteristics (such as naivety
or inconsistency). This study found that participants rated themselves
more favorably than their friends, but rated their friends more
favorably than other peers (but there were several moderating factors).
Research by Perloff and Fetzer, Brown, and Henri Tajfel and John C. Turner also found friends being rated higher than other peers. Tajfel and Turner attributed this to an "ingroup bias" and suggested that this was motivated by the individual's desire for a "positive social identity".
Moderating factors
While
illusory superiority has been found to be somewhat self-serving, this
does not mean that it will predictably occur—it is not constant. The
strength of the effect is moderated by many factors, the main examples
of which have been summarized by Alicke and Govorun (2005).
Interpretability/ambiguity of trait
This
is a phenomenon that Alicke and Govorun have described as "the nature
of the judgement dimension" and refers to how subjective (abstract) or
objective (concrete) the ability or characteristic being evaluated is.
Research by Sedikides & Strube (1997) has found that people are
more self-serving (the effect of illusory superiority is stronger) when
the event in question is more open to interpretation, for example social constructs such as popularity and attractiveness are more interpretable than characteristics such as intelligence and physical ability. This has been partly attributed also to the need for a believable self-view.
The idea that ambiguity moderates illusory superiority has
empirical research support from a study involving two conditions: in
one, participants were given criteria for assessing a trait as ambiguous
or unambiguous, and in the other participants were free to assess the
traits according to their own criteria. It was found that the effect of
illusory superiority was greater in the condition where participants
were free to assess the traits.
The effects of illusory superiority have also been found to be
strongest 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 recognize their own incompetence.
Method of comparison
The
method used in research into illusory superiority has been found to
have an implication on the strength of the effect found. Most studies
into illusory superiority involve a comparison between an individual and
an average peer, of which there are two methods: direct comparison and
indirect comparison. A direct comparison—which is more commonly
used—involves the participant rating themselves and the average peer on
the same scale, from "below average" to "above average" and results in participants being far more self-serving.
Researchers have suggested that this occurs due to the closer
comparison between the individual and the average peer, however use of
this method means that it is impossible to know whether a participant
has overestimated themselves, underestimated the average peer, or both.
The indirect method of comparison involves participants rating
themselves and the average peer on separate scales and the illusory
superiority effect is found by taking the average peer score away from
the individual's score (with a higher score indicating a greater
effect). While the indirect comparison method is used less often it is
more informative in terms of whether participants have overestimated
themselves or underestimated the average peer, and can therefore provide
more information about the nature of illusory superiority.
Comparison target
The
nature of the comparison target is one of the most fundamental
moderating factors of the effect of illusory superiority, and there are
two main issues relating to the comparison target that need to be
considered.
First, research into illusory superiority is distinct in terms of
the comparison target because an individual compares themselves with a
hypothetical average peer rather than a tangible person. Alicke et al.
(1995) found that the effect of illusory superiority was still present
but was significantly reduced when participants compared themselves with
real people (also participants in the experiment, who were seated in
the same room), as opposed to when participants compared themselves with
an average peer. This suggests that research into illusory superiority
may itself be biasing results and finding a greater effect than would
actually occur in real life.
Further research into the differences between comparison targets
involved four conditions where participants were at varying proximity to
an interview with the comparison target: watching live in the same
room; watching on tape; reading a written transcript; or making
self-other comparisons with an average peer. It was found that when the
participant was further removed from the interview situation (in the
tape observation and transcript conditions) the effect of illusory
superiority was found to be greater. Researchers asserted that these
findings suggest that the effect of illusory superiority is reduced by
two main factors—individuation of the target and live contact with the
target.
Second, Alicke et al.'s (1995) studies investigated whether the
negative connotations to the word "average" may have an effect on the
extent to which individuals exhibit illusory superiority, namely whether
the use of the word "average" increases illusory superiority.
Participants were asked to evaluate themselves, the average peer and a
person whom they had sat next to in the previous experiment, on various
dimensions. It was found that they placed themselves highest, followed
by the real person, followed by the average peer, however the average
peer was consistently placed above the mean point on the scale,
suggesting that the word "average" did not have a negative effect on the
participant's view of the average peer.
Controllability
An
important moderating factor of the effect of illusory superiority is
the extent to which an individual believes they are able to control and
change their position on the dimension concerned. According to Alicke
& Govorun positive characteristics that an individual believes are
within their control are more self-serving, and negative characteristics
that are seen as uncontrollable are less detrimental to
self-enhancement.
This theory was supported by Alicke's (1985) research, which found that
individuals rated themselves as higher than an average peer on positive
controllable traits and lower than an average peer on negative
uncontrollable traits. The idea, suggested by these findings, that
individuals believe that they are responsible for their success and some
other factor is responsible for their failure is known as the self-serving bias.
Individual differences of judge
Personality
characteristics vary widely between people and have been found to
moderate the effects of illusory superiority, one of the main examples
of this is self-esteem. Brown (1986) found that in self-evaluations of
positive characteristics participants with higher self-esteem showed
greater illusory superiority bias than participants with lower
self-esteem.
Additionally, another study found that participants pre-classified as
having high self-esteem tended to interpret ambiguous traits in a
self-serving way, whereas participants pre-classified as having low
self-esteem did not do this.
Relation to mental health
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—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 illusory superiority 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. 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).
Worse-than-average effect
In contrast to what is commonly believed, research has found that
better-than-average effects are not universal. In fact, much recent
research has found the opposite effect in many tasks, especially if they
were more difficult.
Self-esteem
Illusory superiority's relationship with self-esteem is uncertain.
The theory that those with high self-esteem maintain this high level by
rating themselves highly is not without merit—studies involving non-depressed
college students found that they thought they had more control over
positive outcomes compared to their peers, even when controlling for
performance.
Non-depressed students also actively rate peers below themselves as
opposed to rating themselves higher. Students were able to recall a
great deal more negative personality traits about others than about
themselves.
In these studies there was no distinction made between people
with legitimate and illegitimate high self-esteem, as other studies have
found that absence of positive illusions mainly coexist with high self-esteem and that determined individuals bent on growth and learning are less prone to these illusions.
Thus it may be that while illusory superiority is associated with
undeserved high self-esteem, people with legitimate high self-esteem do
not necessarily exhibit it.
