Everyone Here Is Above Average

I continue, in this series on David McRaney.

This is a poker blog that has yet to resemble a poker blog.

Bear with me?

McRaney:

Taylor & Brown revealed a new side to the research of well-being & found that you maintain happiness under the spell of three broad positive illusions: illusory superiority bias, an unrealistically positive view of yourself; the illusion of control, the belief that you have command over the chaos that awaits you every day; & optimism bias, the belief in a future that can't possibly be as great as you expect it to be.

***
SUPERIORITY BIAS

Have you ever had the thought while stuffed into an airplane or pressed against strangers in a subway car that you are probably the dumbest person in the room? What about at a shopping mall near the holidays, people bumping into you, children screaming, long lines of angry shoppers huffing & loudly answering phones using the latest pop music hits to signal incoming calls -- in that environment, do you have a gut feeling that you would struggle in a game of Trivial Pursuit with the average shopper? How about opening night of a blockbuster movie? Do you sit in a crowd listening to people having casual conversations about their sister-in-law's hemorrhoid operation &, upon comparison with the people around you, see yourself as below average in the realms of politeness & consideration?

Imagine in any one of these scenarios that you had every person in the room take an IQ test. Where do you think you would rank compared with others in the group? Near the top? Near the bottom? What if you compared your driving skills with those of everyone else on the road during your typical morning commute? Imagine we created a graph that judged the cooking ability of every person in your high-school graduating class on a scale from one to ten. Where do you think you would fall on that scale? Most people put themselves slightly above average, so in this imaginary experiment -- unless you know you are a terrible or an excellent cook -- you likely thought you were about a six.

The illusory superiority bias allows you to move thru airports & movie theaters unhindered by the burden of realistic analysis. This is an enchantment generated by the brain that allows you to judge yourself in a light more positive & less harsh than the one you shine on others, & the end result is that you tend to see yourself as unique & apart from the crowd, & you tend to see the crowd as homogenous & a bit dull.

You may even wonder sometimes how everyone around you can be so stupid when it seems so easy to be, you know, smart like you.

Chances are you see yourself as slightly above average in most categories, & way above average in a few. When you compare yourself to an imaginary average person, you see yourself as superior in just about every category. The irony, of course, is that in most airports, subways, movie theaters, & shopping malls, the majority of the people squirming inside are thinking the same thing. The research suggests that the average person thinks she is not the average person. She thinks most people are dumb, & that she is not like most people.