Illusory Superiority: Why Everyone Thinks They Are Above Average

Garrison Keillor's fictional Lake Wobegon is a place where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average. The joke, of course, is that above average is a statistical condition that cannot apply to a majority of any population. And yet psychologists have found that a large majority of humans believe they fall above average on most positive dimensions.

In a now-classic 1977 study, ninety-three percent of American drivers rated themselves as above average in driving skill. Similar findings have been replicated across cultures and domains: most people think they are above average in intelligence, fairness, humour, trustworthiness, and job performance. They also think they are less biased than average — which is, if anything, the most impressive demonstration of the bias.

This is illusory superiority, also called the better-than-average effect or the Lake Wobegon effect. It is not straightforward overconfidence. The effect tends to be larger for domains where the criterion is vague and self-referential — like being a good person — and smaller or even reversed for domains with clear, objective measurement, like solving mathematical problems. When there is an objective scoreboard, reality intrudes. When the dimension is fuzzy, the self-serving interpretation expands.

Cultural variation matters too. The effect is robust but somewhat smaller in East Asian countries, where collectivist values and modesty norms create social pressure against self-promotion. It is particularly pronounced in North America and Western Europe. But it is present everywhere at some level.

Why does it persist? Several reasons. We have better access to our own intentions and effort than to those of others, which makes our contributions seem larger relative to what we can observe. We set the criteria for goodness in domains we are good at. We remember our virtuous moments more clearly than our lapses. And there are social rewards for projecting confidence that may have shaped the tendency over time.

The corrective is not to develop contempt for yourself, but to hold your self-assessments more loosely, to seek genuine external feedback, and to be especially wary of self-evaluations in domains that matter to your identity. The areas where we are most motivated to see ourselves favourably are the areas where our self-perception is least reliable.