secrets-of-mental-math-malestrom

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Secrets of Mental Math
seniors, 0 percent rated themselves below average in “ability to
get along with others,” while 60 percent put themselves in the
top 10 percent (presumably not all were from Lake Woebegone).
And according to a 1997 U.S. News & World Report study on
who Americans believe are most likely to go to heaven, 52 percent
said Bill Clinton, 60 percent thought Princess Diana, 65 percent
chose Michael Jordan, 79 percent selected Mother Teresa,
and, at 87 percent, the person most likely to go to heaven was
the survey taker!
Princeton University psychology professor Emily Pronin
and her colleagues tested a bias called blind spot, in which
subjects recognized the existence and influence in others of
eight different cognitive biases, but they failed to see those
same biases in themselves. In one study on Stanford University
students, when asked to compare themselves to their peers on
such personal qualities as friendliness and selfishness, they predictably
rated themselves higher. Even when the subjects were
warned about the better-than-average bias and were asked to
reevaluate their original assessments, 63 percent claimed that
their initial evaluations were objective, and 13 percent even
claimed that they were originally too modest! In a second
study, Pronin randomly assigned subjects high or low scores
on a “social intelligence” test. Unsurprisingly, those given the
high marks rated the test fairer and more useful than those
receiving low marks. When asked if it was possible that they
had been influenced by the score on the test, subjects responded
that other participants had been far more biased than they
were. In a third study in which Pronin queried subjects about
what method they used to assess their own and others’ biases,
she found that people tend to use general theories of behavior
when evaluating others, but use introspection when appraising