Are you more attractive than the person next to you? From the get-go, this may strike you as an easy question to answer. For instance, participants in a study done by Epley & Whitchurch (2008) were more likely to identify enhanced images of themselves as their own, although they correctly identified unmodified versions of strangers’ images as authentic. Also, people frequently indicate they are less likely to experience misfortune than the average person (Perloff & Fetzer, 1986; Weinstein, 1980). First popularized by Alicke (1985), this phenomenon has come to be known as the “better-than-average effect” (BTAE) or “above-average effect” and gained much attention in the field of social psychology.

Recently, however, the findings have been complicated by many follow-up studies. In one study, the researchers found that people are equally likely to underrate themselves regardless of their actual performance (Engeler and Häubl, 2021). Other studies (Kruger, 1999; Moore & Small, 2007) revealed a tendency of individuals to rate themselves as less capable than others, though the overall data to this date has confirmed the salience of the BTAE: “results indicated that the BTAE is robust across studies (dz = 0.79, 95%  [0.71, 0.84]) with little evidence of publication bias” (Zell et al., 2020). In this essay, I argue that the BTAE is best explained by an attributional blindspot created by the asymmetrical perception of bias between self and others. This proposition well explains the consistent concentration of responses in the above average region while accounting for the newly found variance resulting from changes in solicitation methods.  

In the follow-up studies on the BTAE, the richer variability implies that the BTAE is less a static feature and more a fluid phenomenon. Most notably, the precise language and wording of the questions employed in the studies have been shown to significantly affect outcomes: “…it means that what we believe about ourselves often depends on how these beliefs are solicited…asking people to give a specific percentile estimate of their own ability…may diminish people’s sense of self-superiority relative to the other approaches” (Heck, 2020). Indeed, upon a closer examination of countervailing evidence, we can see a notable pattern: participants’ responses tend to become less skewed, either upwards or downwards, when provided more clarity in terms of the object of comparison, such as skills or personal qualities about which they are asked, and the reference, against whom they are compared: 

the nature of the comparison target provides another, perhaps even more fundamental source of ambiguity in the social comparison process. In virtually every published study on the better-than-average effect, the target with whom participants are asked to compare themselves is an average peer – most frequently, the average college student. This target permits a high level of ambiguity or subjectivity in the comparison process. (Moore & Small, 2007)

In fact, people tend to underrate themselves with regard to objectively difficult tasks or rare occurrences such as juggling, coping with the death of a loved one, or their probability of living past a hundred years of age (Blanton et al., 2001; Chambers et al., 2003; Kruger, 1999). Also, researchers observed that the better-than-average effect is diminished when given an “enriched version of the average student” as the reference, a quantitatively well-defined comparison target (Klar & Giladi, 1997). This contrasts with the salient BTAE observed in studies that employed the language “the average person” as the reference. Together, these findings indicate that the BTAE is “diminished as the social comparison becomes less ambiguous (italics mine), or more objectively defined” (Alicke et al., 1995). People produce more extreme responses, either positively or negatively, when compared to vague or abstract counterparts (Moore & Small, 2007).

Research suggests that this discrepancy is introduced by the ambiguity surrounding the meaning of “average,” creating an information gap between the self and the reference. Study participants are not given, for instance, the precise win rate of the “average tennis player,” nor can subjective terms like “attractiveness” be objectively defined. In fact, there are three levels of ambiguity at work: the self, about which they have the most information, the task, about which they have some information, and the average peer, about which they have the least information. In other words, even if one knew one’s precise win rate in tennis, one still would not know how the average person would fare, rendering it impossible to produce an answer (Moore & Small, 2007). In contrast, when asked to compare one’s tennis prowess to those of, say, Serena Williams, few would respond in the same manner (Brown, 2011).  From the outset, this asymmetry would appear to induce the participant to ignore what he or she does not know and produce an answer based just on the known information (availability heuristic): 

Our results extend the proposed influence of egocentrism in other judgment domains. For example, characteristics of tasks, such as their level of difficulty, have been shown to influence comparative ability judgments (Kruger, 1999). Individuals provide “better-than average” comparative ability judgments for relatively easy tasks (e.g., using a computer mouse) but “worse than-average” comparative judgments for relatively difficult tasks (e.g., writing computer code)” (Chambers et al, 2003). 

Although this explanation is plausible for tasks whose difficulty levels are uncontroversial, it still cannot explain why in less clear-cut ones like teaching ability, the BTAE stays pronounced: “94% of college instructors do consider themselves to be above average in teaching ability” (Alicke et al., 1995). In short, it fails to account for perhaps the most idiosyncratic feature of the studies: their “statistical impossibility.” How is it possible that most people’s responses are as concentrated as they are, as if they had colluded? 

This is possibly because people apply different baseline expectations of bias for the self and others. Research on the perception of bias has noted a “perceived asymmetry in susceptibility to bias.” It has been found that people are prone to attribute bias to other people’s claims and less so to their own: 

individuals readily cite, and even exaggerate, the role of biases such as the ‘fundamental attribution error’ (van Boven, Kamada, & Gilovich, 1999), self-serving attributions of personal responsibility (Kruger & Gilovich, 1999), and the tendency to rely on personal self-interest in making decisions ‘for the greater good’ (Miller & Ratner, 1998) in accounting for others’ responses (Pronin et al., 2002).

Consistent with a previously mentioned finding, more available knowledge about the self, compared to others, fuels the predilection for such attribution: “we hold our experience of people, objects, and events in our world to be veridical, more or less ‘unmediated,’ perceptions of reality” (Pronin et al., 2002). In other words, we tend to think that “we speak our mind” because we believe our thought processes are transparent to us, while we tend to weigh other people’s claims with a grain of salt because theirs are not. Seen this way, people may be pricing in self-serving bias when interpreting the word “average,” rendering it “below-average.” This pattern has also been pointed out in BTAE studies such as Alicke & Klotz (1995), Kim et al., (1995), and Perloff & Fetzer (1986).

What may not cross people’s mind, however, is that each one of them is also a human being like any other, which makes them as susceptible to bias as anyone else. Indeed, Armor (1999), Epley & Dunning (2000) and Miller & Ratner (1998) suggested that most people exhibit the belief that they are moral and selfless, making it easy for them to declare the biasedness of others but much less so of themselves, because they are less guarded about their own likelihood of falling under the same imperfections. Moreover, Ehrlinger et al. (2005) found that “… people are least likely to think a judgment is biased when they are most likely to introspect – when assessing whether their own specific judgments they just rendered are likely to be biased.” Being little vigilant about one’s own susceptibility to bias, compared to the bias one is quick to recognize in others, in fact reinforces such a bias, if there were any to begin with. 

Starting out with the assumption of a bias, therefore, people are more likely to feel comfortable ticking “above average” to mean that they are somewhere around the average by compensating for the assumed overvaluation of the reference. This, in turn, is coupled with the tendency to apply a more uncritical attitude toward one’s own biasedness: “the illusion of objectivity may serve as a core or central bias that allows people to get away with other biases in their judgments about themselves and others” (Armor, 1999). Finally, such a mix allows the BTAE to form a self-perpetuating cycle. At this point, one might wonder how, even when acknowledging there is some bias, people come to believe that it is a self-enhancing, not a self-deprecating, kind? If the BTAE is as consistently observed, as reported by Zell et al. (2020), it is conceivable that people are familiar with this tendency in real life, especially in today’s hyperconnected milieu. Qiu et al. (2017) noted that today, social media platforms reinforce a “positivity bias,” where users project an overly confident, positive self-image. Filling out social media profiles can be compared to answering self-evaluative questions in the BTAE studies, and indeed, researchers have found that around 71% of people misrepresent themselves on social media by enhancing their physical and personal qualities (The Modems, 2021). However, unlike in psychological experiments, the results are available in plain sight for all to see.

As we have seen in the studies, that which denotes “average” or “mean” is often inflected through an internal, if unconscious, bias and becomes below average – which helps us fathom why a relatively low percentage of respondents choose to describe themselves as such. Conversely, the BTAE is moderated when the question contains an objectively uncommon trait, an obvious difficulty, or highly individuated language because the subjective attribution of bias to the comparison target is “tempered by the need to maintain believability not only to public audiences but also to the private self. Thus, real social comparisons may heighten the fear of invalidity.” (Kruglanski, 1990; Alicke & Klotz, 1995).  As far as the term “average” is used, our mental correction mechanism is likely to kick in, resulting in a potentially off-center statistic. In other words, if corrected for the discrepancy in perception involving the term average, the overall response curve would shift more to the middle. So, to answer the question posed at the beginning of my essay – are you more attractive than the person next to you? Well, if she thinks she is, why should I not be any less?

References

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