In social psychology, illusory superiority is a cognitive bias wherein people overestimate their own qualities and abilities compared to others.
[2] The Dunning-Kruger effect is a form of illusory superiority shown by people on a task where their level of skill is low.
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.
[4][5]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".
Kruger (1999) found support for the egocentrism explanation in his research involving participant ratings of their ability on easy and difficult tasks.
[11] 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 involved participants rating certain behaviors as likely to increase or decrease the chance of a series of life events happening to them.
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.
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.
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.
[19] In a similar survey, 87% of Master of Business Administration students at Stanford University rated their academic performance as above the median.
[22] 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.
[23] 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.
[24] 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.
[26] Research by Burson, Larrick, and Klayman suggests that the effect is not so obvious and may be due to noise and bias levels.
[27] Dunning, Kruger, and coauthors' 2008 paper on this subject comes to qualitatively similar conclusions[clarification needed] after making some attempt to test alternative explanations.
[28] Svenson (1981) surveyed 161 students in Sweden and the United States, asking them to compare their driving skills and safety to other people's.
[33][34] Illusory superiority has been found in studies comparing memory self-reports, such as Schmidt, Berg & Deelman's research in older adults.
[39] Research by Perloff and Fetzer,[14] Brown,[40] and Henri Tajfel and John C. Turner[41] 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".
[6] 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.
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.
This suggests that research into illusory superiority may itself be biasing results and finding a greater effect than would actually occur in real life.
[45] 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.
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.
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.
[46] Since then, further research has both undermined that conclusion and offered new evidence associating illusory superiority with negative effects on the individual.
[17] 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.
[17] 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.
[17] 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).