The straight line

Half Sigma has been writing about optimism bias recently. I found a post about the tendency to overestimate one’s intelligence to be especially striking. A chart I stole from it:

The chart tells you what amount of subjects self-assessed themselves to be in which “intelligence group”. The study was on US high school seniors who I guess might be more optimistic than Finnish kids, but still. Under seven percent of subjects considered themselves to be below average in intelligence and over sixty percent considered themselves to be above average. Almost any way you interpret this, if someone tells you they’re of above average intelligence, the best assumption you can make on that information alone is that they’re not.

An interesting question about optimism bias (like this) is its cause. My first idea was an evolutionary explanation: that optimistic males will try out more things and be more adventurous – in particular they’ll go after more females even after failure. For well-known biological reasons it would then make sense for females to have a smaller optimism bias than males, but this is not supported by evidence (in humans). Maybe it happens with other animals?

Anyway, it seems possible that the majority of optimism bias in humans is caused instead by humanness, ie. culture, society and so on. But how can this be? I’ve always assumed that it would be extra painful to have a high opinion of oneself and to be proven wrong all the time. Perhaps it’s even more painful to self-admit one’s mediocrity/suckiness.

As for the intelligence thing: I’ve always kind of assumed that I scrape into “above average”, but considering this I’m not so sure anymore. The only real way to know is to get tested, and I don’t want to. Too scary.