Why We Make Mistakes: Post #11--Above Average?

We All Think We’re Above Average: To quote Garrison Keillor, “Welcome to Lake Wobegon, where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” We tend to overestimate our own value and are almost always wrong. According to one psychologist/researcher Stephano DellaVigna at Berkeley, “Almost everyone is overconfident—except the people who are depressed, and they tend to be realists.” And in situations where confidence is overly high, there tend to be poor feedback systems. Such blatant overconfidence leads to all sorts of errors, not the least of which is thinking we’re matched to any problem that comes our way.