Why Everyone Thinks They Are Better Than Average

There is a particular kind of driver who spends most of a journey providing unsolicited commentary on the deficiencies of everyone else on the road.

The person in front is too slow. The person behind is too close. Nobody understands how roundabouts work anymore. Indicators have apparently become optional, lane discipline has collapsed and the entire motorway network is populated by people who should never have been allowed near heavy machinery.

All of this is usually delivered while your driver is travelling six feet from the car in front, attempting to change the satnav and becoming involved in a territorial dispute with a white van.

Ask them whether they are a good driver, however, and the answer will arrive without hesitation.

Of course they are.

This is not an isolated act of self-confidence. It is one of the most reliable and entertaining features of human psychology. Most of us believe we are more capable, reasonable, considerate and self-aware than the people around us.

We are not usually claiming to be exceptional. That would sound arrogant. We simply believe that we are a little better than average.

The problem, of course, is that almost everyone else believes exactly the same thing.

The mathematical impossibility of ordinary life

In 1981, psychologist Ola Svenson asked groups of American and Swedish participants to compare their driving ability with that of the other drivers in their group.

Among the American participants, 93 per cent placed themselves above the median for driving skill. Among the Swedish group, 69 per cent did the same. The participants were not merely saying they were competent. Most were saying that they belonged in the better half of a group in which, mathematically, only half of them could.

Drivers are particularly fertile territory for this kind of research because driving combines everyday familiarity with almost limitless scope for self-deception. People accumulate years of experience without necessarily accumulating equivalent skill. They also have a convenient explanation available for almost every mistake. The road was confusing, the weather was poor, the other driver behaved unpredictably or the satnav gave a late instruction.

Their own role in events can therefore be edited before the memory is stored.

The effect extends far beyond driving. Researchers call it the better-than-average effect, a tendency to evaluate ourselves more favourably than the average person on desirable qualities and abilities.

In a preregistered replication involving 1,573 participants and 149 personality traits, researchers found that people continued to describe desirable traits as more characteristic of themselves than of others. The effect was particularly strong for qualities people considered controllable, which is useful because controllable qualities are precisely the ones for which we feel most personally deserving of credit.

Most people do not merely believe they are pleasant. They believe they have done something to become pleasant.

We see ourselves as better listeners, more thoughtful partners, more ethical colleagues and calmer leaders. We are unusually good judges of character, relatively resistant to manipulation and admirably willing to change our minds when presented with new evidence.

The average person, by contrast, is emotional, biased and often incapable of merging correctly.

We judge ourselves by our intentions and everyone else by their behaviour

One reason for this flattering self-assessment is that we possess two very different types of information.

When evaluating ourselves, we have access to our intentions, reasoning, circumstances, memories and private feelings. When evaluating someone else, we largely have their observable behaviour.

When we interrupt, we know that we were excited by the conversation and desperate to contribute. When someone else interrupts, we experience only the fact that they spoke over us.

When we send a blunt email, we remember the pressure we were under, the five previous messages we had already written and the urgent problem we were trying to resolve. When we receive a blunt email, we see a person who apparently regards basic courtesy as an inefficient use of company time.

Our own lateness has a story behind it. Someone else’s lateness has a character flaw behind it.

This asymmetry allows us to preserve a positive view of ourselves without consciously ignoring reality. We do not deny that we were late, impatient or difficult. We simply place the behaviour inside a context that makes it understandable.

Other people rarely receive the same generosity because we do not have access to their internal commentary. We see the action without the deleted scenes.

This creates an awkward gap between intention and impact. We may sincerely intend to be supportive while making someone feel diminished. We may intend to bring clarity while leaving everyone confused. We may intend to create urgency while merely creating anxiety.

Because the intention feels good, however, we struggle to accept that the behaviour may not have been.

The bias that makes us believe we are not biased

Our ability to identify self-deception in other people is usually excellent.

We can see when a colleague is protecting their ego, when a friend is rationalising a poor decision or when a politician has developed a sudden philosophical commitment to whichever argument is most convenient.

The difficulty begins when the same analysis is directed towards us.

Psychologists Emily Pronin, Daniel Lin and Lee Ross described this as the “bias blind spot”. Across several studies, participants consistently saw cognitive and motivational biases as more influential in other people than in themselves.

Even more impressively, some participants continued to insist that their judgements were objective after being shown an explanation of the very bias affecting them. Learning about bias did not necessarily remove it. It merely gave people a better vocabulary for diagnosing everybody else.

This helps explain the unusual experience of arguing with someone who believes they are the only participant in the discussion approaching it rationally.

They can see that you have emotions, prior beliefs, personal interests and a limited perspective. They know that your interpretation has been shaped by your experiences.

Their own interpretation, meanwhile, has simply emerged from a clean and impartial reading of the facts.

This rarely feels like arrogance from the inside. It feels like clarity.

That is what makes the better-than-average effect so durable. We do not experience ourselves as inventing a flattering version of reality. We experience ourselves as removing the distortions that prevent everyone else from seeing it properly.

Confidence and competence are not the same thing

No discussion of inflated self-perception can travel far before encountering the Dunning-Kruger effect, although the popular version has become rather less precise than the original research.

It is often reduced to the idea that stupid people believe they are brilliant. The research made a more interesting point.

In four studies involving tests of humour, grammar and logical reasoning, Justin Kruger and David Dunning found that people who performed poorly were also less able to recognise the quality of their performance. Participants whose results placed them around the 12th percentile estimated that they had performed around the 62nd percentile.

Crucially, when some of those participants improved their underlying skills, their ability to assess themselves improved as well. The knowledge required to perform a task could also be necessary to recognise whether the task had been performed successfully.

A person who knows very little about a subject may therefore feel comfortably informed because they cannot yet see what is missing.

A person who has spent twenty years studying the same subject has encountered its contradictions, edge cases and unresolved questions. They have learned that every simple answer is standing on top of several complicated ones.

This is why the recently informed can sound so refreshing. They have confidence, clarity and three facts. The expert has qualifications, caveats and a growing suspicion that the question may have been incorrectly framed.

None of this means confidence is evidence of incompetence. Highly capable people can be extremely confident, often with good reason. It means that confidence is not reliable proof of competence because each is produced by a different process.

Confidence comes from how certain the answer feels.

Competence comes from whether the answer survives contact with reality.

Unfortunately, meetings, interviews and public debate often reward the first long before anyone has an opportunity to measure the second.

Why feedback rarely solves the problem

The obvious remedy for inaccurate self-perception is feedback.

In theory, other people provide information that corrects our internal version of events. In practice, human beings possess a remarkable ability to receive feedback without allowing it to alter anything important.

We do not always reject the feedback itself. That would appear defensive. Instead, we challenge its interpretation.

Perhaps the person misunderstood our intentions. Perhaps they are unusually sensitive. Perhaps they are intimidated by direct communication. Perhaps they have never worked in a genuinely high-performance environment. Perhaps they are reacting to a single incident that does not represent who we really are.

Each explanation may be plausible. Taken together, they form an almost impenetrable defence system.

This becomes especially powerful when the feedback threatens a quality central to our identity.

Someone who sees themselves as kind can accept that they made an administrative error more easily than they can accept that they behaved cruelly. Someone who has built an identity around being a strong communicator may conclude that the audience failed to listen. A leader who prides themselves on being approachable may interpret the absence of criticism as proof that everyone feels comfortable speaking openly.

The possibility that people are frightened to approach them never has to enter the analysis.

Feedback becomes even more complicated as people gain status. Seniority tends to alter the information environment around a person. Colleagues become more selective, disagreement becomes more carefully phrased and laughter becomes more generous.

Research by Adam Galinsky and his colleagues found that experiences of power were associated with reduced perspective-taking. In their studies, participants placed in higher-power conditions were less likely to adopt another person’s visual perspective, less likely to account for knowledge other people did not possess and less accurate at recognising emotional expressions.

Power does not automatically make someone oblivious, but it can remove some of the natural pressures that force people to consider how they appear from the outside.

The further someone rises, the less reliable the social mirror can become.

The workplace hall of mirrors

This is why organisations are filled with people who regard themselves as excellent listeners.

They can all remember occasions when they allowed someone else to finish a sentence. They can recall asking a thoughtful question during a meeting or generously inviting the team to share its views after delivering a 25-minute explanation of their own.

Their colleagues may remember different moments.

The manager remembers being decisive. The team remembers that nobody else was permitted to contribute.

The executive remembers challenging complacency. Everyone else remembers a needlessly aggressive conversation about a formatting mistake.

The colleague remembers being refreshingly honest. The recipient remembers cancelling their afternoon to recover.

Neither version is necessarily fabricated. Each person has simply selected different evidence and assigned it different meaning.

Organisations often worsen this by rewarding outcomes without examining behaviour. A successful person may assume that every personal quality contributed to their success, including the ones colleagues endured rather than admired.

Impatience becomes pace. Intimidation becomes gravitas. A refusal to listen becomes conviction. Taking credit becomes executive presence.

Eventually, the organisation develops an entire vocabulary for converting unpleasant behaviour into leadership characteristics.

Success can therefore make self-awareness less accurate. It provides evidence that something worked, but not necessarily evidence that everything the successful person did was responsible.

The useful lie

It would be tempting to conclude that all self-enhancement is harmful and that the ideal person should pursue ruthless accuracy about their abilities, motives and prospects.

Psychology offers a more complicated picture.

In an influential 1988 paper, Shelley Taylor and Jonathon Brown argued that mildly positive illusions about ourselves, our degree of control and our future prospects can support wellbeing, persistence and productive behaviour.

A completely accurate view of ourselves may not always be psychologically optimal. People who believe they can cope are more likely to attempt difficult things. Those who expect improvement may persist through periods in which the evidence remains stubbornly unencouraging.

Much of human achievement probably depends on people beginning projects before they possess a fully realistic understanding of how difficult those projects will be.

Nobody would raise children, start companies, write books, renovate houses or enter marathons if they were first required to demonstrate a precise appreciation of what lay ahead.

A slightly flattering self-image can be useful because action often requires more confidence than the available evidence can reasonably provide.

The problem begins when confidence stops helping us engage with reality and starts protecting us from it.

Believing that we can become a good leader may encourage us to take responsibility and improve. Believing that we already are a brilliant leader, despite the exhausted expressions of everyone we manage, has a different effect.

The aim is not to eliminate the internal story. It is to prevent ourselves from becoming its least critical reader.

The people who are genuinely self-aware

Self-awareness is often imagined as deep introspection. It brings to mind journals, personality assessments and long periods spent examining one’s feelings.

That may help, but introspection has an obvious limitation: it relies on the same mind whose accuracy is being investigated.

We can spend a great deal of time thinking about ourselves while reaching only more sophisticated versions of our existing conclusions.

Genuine self-awareness may be less about looking inward and more about comparing our internal story with external patterns.

Do people repeatedly misunderstand our explanations, despite our belief that we communicate clearly?

Do several unrelated people experience us in similar ways?

Does the atmosphere change when we enter a room?

Do people challenge us voluntarily, or only when specifically invited and carefully protected?

Do our intentions consistently produce the impact we expected?

The self-aware person is not someone who assumes they are bad at everything. That is merely another distorted assessment.

They can hold two ideas at the same time: they may be good at something, and they may be wrong about how good they are.

They do not surrender their confidence at the first criticism, but neither do they manufacture a new explanation every time the same criticism returns.

They pay particular attention to repeated feedback delivered by different people in different circumstances. At a certain point, the most efficient explanation may no longer be that everyone else has independently misunderstood them in exactly the same way.

A small and potentially unpleasant experiment

Choose one positive quality that you strongly associate with yourself.

Perhaps you consider yourself a good listener, a calm leader, a thoughtful partner, a fair-minded colleague or someone who responds well to feedback.

Then avoid asking whether that description feels true. It almost certainly does. Instead, look for evidence that would make it false.

When do people stop being candid around you?

Which conversations repeatedly end badly despite your good intentions?

What criticism have you received more than once but dismissed for a different reason each time?

Who has the clearest view of the gap between the person you intend to be and the person you occasionally become?

The purpose is not to conduct a comprehensive demolition of your self-esteem. It is simply to introduce some competition into a market currently dominated by one highly persuasive version of events.

Most of us are not delusional about everything. We are selectively generous in precisely the areas that matter most to our identity.

That is why the most useful question may not be, “What am I bad at?”

It may be, “Which quality am I so certain I possess that I have stopped checking?”

Back on the road

The driver is still explaining that standards have deteriorated.

They have now missed the turning, blamed the road signs and moved abruptly across two lanes while continuing to criticise someone else’s use of a roundabout.

They remain certain that they are an excellent driver.

Perhaps they are. That is the irritating possibility at the heart of the better-than-average effect. Some of the people who think they are above average really are.

The difficulty is that the feeling of being right is distributed far more widely than the reality.

Our self-image is not a formal assessment assembled from impartial evidence. It is a story built from selective memories, generous interpretations and privileged access to our own intentions. It helps us act, recover and retain enough confidence to attempt things we may not yet be capable of doing.

It also makes us remarkably resistant to information we would immediately recognise as significant in someone else.

The better-than-average effect survives because it does not feel like vanity. It feels like an accurate assessment made by the one person with access to all the relevant evidence.

We do not walk through life believing that we are biased, defensive or unusually skilled at explaining away our mistakes.

We walk through life believing that we are the one person seeing the situation clearly.

Which is, of course, exactly what everyone else thinks too.