Thinking about New Year’s resolutions this year? If you think you don’t need to make a resolution because you’re already wonderful—well, science says, you’re probably wrong.
Human beings, it seems, are notoriously incompetent at self-assessment.
In the December issue of Scientific American Mind, David Dunning, professor of psychology at Cornell University, Chip Heath, professor of organization behavior at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, and Jerry M. Suls, professor of psychology at the University of Iowa, give a long list of examples.
Motorcyclists believe they are less likely to cause an accident than the typical biker. Business leaders believe their company is more likely to succeed than the average company. A 1994 study at Wilfred Laurier University found that college students take three weeks longer to finish their senior thesis than what they considered their most “realistic” estimate, and a full week longer than their “worst-case” estimate. (As a freelance writer who tends to underestimate how long it will take to complete projects, that strikes close to home.)
Canadian taxpayers, according to a 1997 study, typically believe each year that they will complete their tax return a week earlier than they normally do—but each year, they end up completing it about the same time as usual.
Among the factors at work are the above-average effect and the over-prediction of desirable events.
The above-average effect is the tendency for everyone to consider him or herself above average. How often have you met someone who is a self-described “lousy driver,” even though every day on the roads you (who, of course, consider yourself an above-average driver) see plenty of lousy drivers? Another example: studies show that college students who score in the bottom 25 percent on a test walk out thinking they had outperformed the majority of their classmates.
The over-prediction of desirable events is just what it sounds like: we think we’ll do better in the future than we really do. (Hence, we underestimate how long it will take to perform a particular task.)
Lack of information contributes to these erroneous assumptions. To use the authors’ example, if you’re asked to create all the English words you can from the letters in the word “spontaneous,” you might come up with 50 and think, hey, that’s pretty good—certainly above average. And it does seem good—until you learn that there are 1,500 English words that can be made from the letters in spontaneous.
Another example the authors use is of an office manager who takes aside a poorly performing employee and chews him out. The employee performs better the next day, and the manager congratulates himself on taking the correct action. But in fact, he lacks the information to assume it was the correct action: perhaps taking no action, or using a gentler approach, would have resulted in even better results.
If we remember that it is impossible to have complete information about all possible outcomes, we should be more cautious in our predictions of future events—or our own future behavior.
And maybe we should learn to lose the egocentrism. You may think you’re a good bicycle rider because riding a bike is easy for you—but you forget, or ignore, the fact that it’s also easy for a lot of other people, which raises the bar of “average” to the point where you may very well be under it rather than over it. (On the other hand, people who really are good at something tend to overestimate everyone else’s ability: if something is easy for you, it’s sometimes hard to believe it could be difficult for other people.)
Our focus on ourselves also leads us to tell stories in which we are the heroes. We look at a situation and spin a tale of what we are likely to do or accomplish within that situation (“I’m a fast and brilliant writer who can whip out that book in a month!”). We would do better to take an outside view, viewing our own past actions dispassionately as simple data points (i.e., “The last time I set a deadline I was overoptimistic by six weeks”) and in comparison to what other people have done (“Other freelance writers take three months to do similar projects; what makes me think I can do it in a month?”).
So, if you think you’re above average in every respect and have no need for resolutions, you’re probably wrong. Resolve away!
Keeping in mind, of course, that most of us have an unrealistic view of our ability to keep resolutions.
2 comments
Ah, but just because you see yourself as a tired, frustrated old man doesn’t mean you are a tired, frustrated old man. Negative self-assessment can be just as faulty as positive self-assessment. Perhaps you are just the opposite: an energetic, fulfilled young girl. The only way to be sure is to ask those around you. 🙂
Greetings from south of the border. I’m good at self-assessment. I see myself as a tired, frustrated old man. And that’s what I am, in fact. –A tired, frustrated old man.