We began our survey of social psychology in the previous tutorial by talking about the
power of situation and framing in shaping our behavior.
Now we are going to focus on ourselves.
More specifically, how do we view ourselves?
How does this differ from how we view other people?
And is there a reason for this difference?
It turns out that we all think we are “special.”
The way we think about ourselves is fundamentally different from the way we think about other
people.
We tend to demonstrate positive illusions about ourselves, and are harsher, or more
realistic, about other people.
There are a few reasons for this illusion.
One is motivational.
We want to maintain a positive view of ourselves because it feels good.
It’s enjoyable to think that you’re better than others at certain tasks.
The other reason is informational.
We have imperfect access to information about ourselves and about others.
We may think we’re better than someone at basketball, even if we’ve never seen the
other person play.
This feeling that we are special leads to something called the spotlight effect.
The spotlight effect is the tendency to think other people are noticing us more than they
actually do.
Have you ever noticed a stain on your clothing when you’re out in public?
We tend to immediately think that everyone else around us notices the stain, and may
even be silently judging us because of it.
But it turns out that probably no one noticed at all.
That’s the spotlight effect.
It generates the narrative of “I thought everyone noticed something about me”, when
in reality they did not.
This spotlight effect is a direct result of how we view ourselves.
Remember, we all think we are special.
To put it another way, we think we are the center of the universe.
And in a way, that’s true.
Unless you can somehow read minds, you will never know exactly what other people are thinking
and experiencing.
Our entire outlook is the result of our own experiences, thoughts, feelings, and perspectives.
We use that knowledge to evaluate the world and the people around us.
But remember that everyone else is also the center of their own universe.
So not only do they lack any knowledge regarding the stain on your clothing, they probably
couldn’t care less because they’re focusing on things that are important to them.
They might even be too busy worrying about a stain on their own clothing that they’re
worried about you noticing.
Bias also contributes to the spotlight effect.
We tend not to think of ourselves as biased.
Instead, what we focus on is accurate, objective, and important.
Because we think that our thoughts are objective, we think that others should also focus on
what we’re preoccupied with.
So that stain on you shirt?
You might think: “It’s huge and bright red, obviously everyone sees how big it is!”
But here’s the thing, it probably isn’t.
Although we imagine our thoughts about the stain to be accurate, they are probably biased.
It feels more noticeable than it actually is.
The spotlight effect is occurring because we use our own experiences and thoughts about
ourselves to assume things about other people’s thoughts and behaviors, and at the same time,
we overestimate how much our perception is actually shared by others, and also how accurate
it is.
So now that we understand the spotlight effect, let’s return to the idea that we view ourselves
in a way that is fundamentally different from the way we view other people.
Remember how we mentioned that we don’t think of ourselves as biased?
It turns out that we are full of self-serving biases.
This is also known as the better-than-average effect.
We tend to think that we are better than average when it comes to certain tasks and qualities.
For example, in a study that surveyed one million high school seniors, 70% of participants
thought they had above average leadership skills.
Another study found that 94% of college professors believe themselves to do above average work.
The better-than-average effect is extremely robust and has been found in nearly every
domain and career that has been studied.
In fact, the average person reports that they are better than average at correctly assessing
themselves without bias!
We also tend to be overconfident.
We are overly generous in our predictions of our own performance.
Think back to your last school or work assignment.
How long did you think it would take?
Chances are, you thought it would take less time than it actually did.
One study on overconfidence asked college students to predict when they would complete
their senior thesis.
Most students finished three weeks after their “most realistic” estimate, and one week
later than their “worst-case scenario.”
We also tend to be overconfident in our estimates of how correct we are when it comes to judgments.
In general, being confident is not reliably correlated with being right.
The Dunning-Kruger effect describes this idea.
Also called the “unskilled and unaware” effect, the Dunning-Kruger effect says that
the less you know about a particular domain, the easier it is to be bad at estimating how
good you are.
This effect explains why people who know next to nothing on a topic will carry on conversations
believing they know everything.
They simply don’t realize how much they don’t know.
For example, one psychological study tested participants on grammar, humor, and logic,
and then asked the participants to estimate how well they performed.
The people who scored the lowest dramatically overestimated how well they performed.
Although they tested in the 12th percentile, they estimated that their performance should
have placed them in the 62nd percentile.
So it’s quite clear that we are biased.
How do we maintain this bias, even when we get information suggesting that our positive
beliefs about ourselves are wrong?
Psychologist Anthony Greenwald suggested in 1980 that it’s the result of what he called
the “Totalitarian Ego”.
This theory says that our minds are like a dictator, controlling information and how
it’s processed in order to benefit itself.
For example, when describing ourselves, we tend to use definitions that make us look
good.
Let’s say that someone asks you how intelligent you and your peers are.
Now, for the sake of this example, say that you don’t have the best test scores.
You might say that you have exemplary street smarts.
This definition of intelligence allows you to ignore your test scores and assert that
you are intelligent.
But when asked how intelligent your peers are, you may say that they have poor test
scores and you are certainly more intelligent.
By changing the definition to best suit your view of yourself, your brain preserves your
self-image.
How do all of these biases come together to shape the way we look at ourselves and how
we look at each other?
As we mentioned at the beginning of this tutorial, we view ourselves as special and different
from everyone else, and as a result, we treat ourselves differently.
We can see this more clearly if we look at how we attribute successes and failures to
people.
When we see events or behaviors in our daily life, we seek reasons for why they occurred.
We want to know why a person did what they did.
When attributing failures or successes to other people, we tend to be more objective.
For example, you might say your friend failed the test because they didn’t study enough.
But we have a self-serving bias when we make attributions about our own behavior.
We attribute failures to situational or uncontrollable factors in a way that casts us in a positive
light.
If you didn’t do well on the test, you might say that you didn’t get enough sleep, or
that the professor wrote a bad exam.
This protects our view of ourselves.
Unlike attributing our friend’s bad grade to them not being smart enough, we place the
blame of our own bad grade on the professor or some other extenuating circumstance.
So it turns out that we really are each the center of our own little universe.
For multiple reasons, we think of ourselves in a fundamentally different way than we think
about other people.
We view ourselves in a more positive light, even if there is evidence that this view of
ourselves is incorrect.
Our minds and their biases do what they can to maintain this positive self-image.
Now that we know more about how we view ourselves, let’s move forward and talk about the last
big topic in social psychology, how we interact with each other.