>This, not arrogance, is the main reason why so many rate themselves as above average at common tasks. Truly ranking yourself is pretty cognitively difficult. You have to construct a mental model of the full range of driving ability in the population, then place yourself in it. So almost everybody substitutes the much easier question "am I good driver?" instead of "am I an above average driver?". And the reality is most driver, even those slightly below average are basically good drivers.
It's completely wrong to attribute to this to something other than cognitive bias. It's totally cognitive bias although arrogance is too strong of a word.
You can see the dissonance in psychological experiments where people rate each other AND themselves. People who rate you will rate you significantly lower than what you rate yourself. This phenomenon appears consistently across multitudes of psychological experiments and is very very repeatable. This happens in experiments where the questions posed are quantitative but not Binary like you arbitrarily constructed in your examples. For example rate this persons programming skills from 1 - 10 is a typical question arising from this experiment.
You also mentioned how difficult it is to rate yourself. Difficulty is irrelevant in the experiments above as all the humans participating in the experiment will be rating the same thing (yourself) making the difficulty not a factor in the rating as it is the same for all people doing the rating.
I would say that your post itself is an example of this cognitive bias, you literally pulled that "binary question" logic out of thin air. Where is your experimental evidence? What made you place this logic above other forms of equally valid logic but counter to your point? Likely you have a subconscious agenda and your reasoning you presented could represent an arbitrarily constructed scaffold of logic to prop up a world view that makes sense to your cognitive bias. Surely if what I said was true you would never know it and likely you will be pulling more logic out of thin air to deconstruct what I said.
That being said there exists a spectrum of people in the world. The article points out that roughly 90% of people will rate themselves higher than what they actually are. What about the remaining 10% What does psychology say about people who don't lie to themselves?
Experiments have found that people who lie to themselves are experimentally more happier and more successful overall than people who don't, in fact many people who can't lie to themselves actually fit the diagnoses of being clinically depressed.
It is not a case of arrogance, I agree with this, it is more of a case of the fact that we lie to ourselves to be happy.
(Arrogance is a negative word that delivers the wrong connotation, but the most accurate way to put it, is people are arrogant because they need to lie to themselves in order to be happy).
It's completely wrong to attribute to this to something other than cognitive bias. It's totally cognitive bias although arrogance is too strong of a word.
You can see the dissonance in psychological experiments where people rate each other AND themselves. People who rate you will rate you significantly lower than what you rate yourself. This phenomenon appears consistently across multitudes of psychological experiments and is very very repeatable. This happens in experiments where the questions posed are quantitative but not Binary like you arbitrarily constructed in your examples. For example rate this persons programming skills from 1 - 10 is a typical question arising from this experiment.
You also mentioned how difficult it is to rate yourself. Difficulty is irrelevant in the experiments above as all the humans participating in the experiment will be rating the same thing (yourself) making the difficulty not a factor in the rating as it is the same for all people doing the rating.
I would say that your post itself is an example of this cognitive bias, you literally pulled that "binary question" logic out of thin air. Where is your experimental evidence? What made you place this logic above other forms of equally valid logic but counter to your point? Likely you have a subconscious agenda and your reasoning you presented could represent an arbitrarily constructed scaffold of logic to prop up a world view that makes sense to your cognitive bias. Surely if what I said was true you would never know it and likely you will be pulling more logic out of thin air to deconstruct what I said.
That being said there exists a spectrum of people in the world. The article points out that roughly 90% of people will rate themselves higher than what they actually are. What about the remaining 10% What does psychology say about people who don't lie to themselves?
Experiments have found that people who lie to themselves are experimentally more happier and more successful overall than people who don't, in fact many people who can't lie to themselves actually fit the diagnoses of being clinically depressed.
It is not a case of arrogance, I agree with this, it is more of a case of the fact that we lie to ourselves to be happy.
(Arrogance is a negative word that delivers the wrong connotation, but the most accurate way to put it, is people are arrogant because they need to lie to themselves in order to be happy).