Lake Wobegon effect
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The Lake Wobegon effect is the human tendency to overestimate one's achievements and capabilities in relation to others. It is named for the fictional town of Lake Wobegon from the radio series A Prairie Home Companion, where, according to Garrison Keillor, "all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average". In a similar way, a large majority of people claim to be above average; this phenomenon has been observed among drivers, CEOs, stock market analysts, college students, police officers and state education officials, among others. Experiments and surveys have repeatedly shown that most people believe that they possess attributes that are better or more desirable than average.
Surveying drivers, Ole Svenson (1981) found that 80% of respondents rated themselves in the top 30% of all drivers.[1] Asking college students about their popularity, Zuckerman and Jost (2001) showed that most students judged themselves to be "more popular than average".[2]
In 1987, John Cannell completed a study that reported the statistically impossible finding that all states claimed average student test scores above the national norm.
One College Board survey asked 829,000 high school seniors to rate themselves in a number of ways. When asked to rate their own ability to "get along with others," a statistically insignificant number — less than one percent — rated themselves as below average. Furthermore, sixty percent rated themselves in the top ten percent, and one-fourth of respondents rated themselves in the top one percent. Some have argued that more subjective traits like this may be more easily distorted.
The effect has been found repeatedly by many other studies for other traits, including fairness, virtuosity, luck, and investing ability, to name a few. It is similar and may be related to ingroup bias and wishful thinking. In contrast, the worse-than-average effect refers to a tendency to underestimate oneself in certain conditions, which may include self-handicapping behavior. It can be compared to the false consensus effect.
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[edit] Logical plausibility
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The following explanations of how more than half of a sample may be above average refer to the arithmetic mean of a series.
[edit] If one point in a series is low enough, all other points may be above average.
Example: Five students are asked to rate their looks on a scale of 1 to 10. Four say they rate their looks as a 9 and the last one says their looks rate as a 4. The mean of that series would be 8, making 80% of the students of above 'average' looks.
[edit] If a series is binary, every non zero point is above average.
Example: One million (or any number) of students take a hypothetical high school exit exam which in this hypothetical situation is rated as either passing or failing (1 or 0, or any two different numbers). Assuming that at least one student fails the test and at least one student passes the test, the mean will lie somewhere between 1 and 0 (or whatever two numbers were originally chosen) and thus every student that fails the test will be below average and every student that passes the test will be above average. If only one student out of that million (or whoever many took the test) failed the test, then every other student, since they passed a test which only has a binary outcome, is above average.
It is impossible for a majority to be above the median.
It is possible that all the children in Lake Wobegon are above the average of a larger population pool (i.e., a town with good dietary and healthcare systems might have children which tended to be above the regional or national average).
[edit] See also
[edit] References
- ^ Svenson, O. (1981). Are we all less risky and more skillful than our fellow drivers? Acta Psychologica, 47, 143-48.
- ^ Zuckerman, E. W., & Jost, J. T. (2001). What Makes You Think You're So Popular? Self Evaluation Maintenance and the Subjective Side of the "Friendship Paradox". Social Psychology Quarterly, 64(3), 207-223.
- Myers, D. G. (1980). The Inflated Self. New York: Seabury Press.
- Kruger J. & Dunning D. (1999). Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Vol. 77, No. 6., p. 121-1134
- Kruger, J. (1999). Lake Wobegon be gone! The "below-average effect" and the egocentric nature of comparative ability judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, 221-232.
