The paradox of knowing
People appear to know other people better than they know themselves, at least when it comes to predicting future behaviour and achievement. Why? People display a rather accurate grasp of human nature in general, knowing how social behaviour is shaped by situational and internal constraints. They just exempt themselves from this understanding, thinking instead that their own actions are more a product of their agency, intentions, and free will – a phenomenon we term ‘misguided exceptionalism’. How does this relate to cultural differences in self-insight? And are there areas of human life where people may still know themselves better than they know other people?
To know others is wisdom, to
know one’s self is enlightenment.
Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu
For the past twenty-odd years, the main discovery in my lab has
been finding out just how unenlightened people are, at least in
the terms that Lao Tzu put it. People appear to harbour many and
frequent false beliefs about their own competence, character,
place in the social world, and future (Dunning, 2005; Dunning et
al., 2004). If ‘knowing yourself’ is a task that many
philosophers and social commentators – from both Western and
Eastern traditions – have exhorted people to accomplish, it
appears that very few are taking the advice seriously enough to
succeed.
But here is the rub. Although people may not possess much enlightenment, according to Lao Tzu’s criteria, they do instead seem to display a lot of wisdom. At least when it comes to making predictions about the future, people achieve more accuracy forecasting what their peers will do than what they themselves will do. Through their predictions, they seem to possess a rough but valid wisdom about the general dynamics of human nature and how it is reflected in people’s actions. They just fail to display the same sagacity when it comes to understanding their own personal dynamics. As psychologists, they appear to be much better social psychologists than self-psychologists.
The
‘holier-than-thou’ phenomenon
in behavioural prediction perhaps best illustrates this paradox
of greater insight into other people than the self. The
phenomenon is defined as people predicting they are far more
likely to engage in socially desirable acts than their peers.
Across several studies, we have asked people to forecast how
they will behave in situations that have an ethical, civic or
altruistic tone. For example, we ask whether they will donate to
charity, or cooperate with another person in an experiment, or
vote in an upcoming election. We also ask them the likelihood
that their peers will do the same. Consistently, we find that
respondents claim that they are much more likely to act in a
socially desirable way than their peers are (Balcetis & Dunning,
2008, 2013; Epley & Dunning, 2000, 2006).
But here is the key twist: We then expose an equivalent set of respondents to the actual situation, to see which prediction – self or peer – better anticipates the true rate at which people ‘do the right thing’. Do self-predictions better anticipate the rate that people act in desirable ways, with people, thus, showing undue cynicism about the character of their peers? Or do peer predictions prove more accurate, demonstrating that people believe too much in their better selves?In our studies we find that people’s peer predictions are the more accurate ones. Self-predictions, in contrast, are wildly optimistic. For example, in one study, a full 90 per cent of students in a large-lecture psychology class eligible to vote in an upcoming US presidential election said that they would. They then provided another student with some relevant information about themselves, such as how interested they were in the election and how pleased would they be if their favoured candidate won. Peers given such information predicted that only 67 per cent of respondents would vote. Actual voting rate among those respondents when the election arrived: 61 per cent (Epley & Dunning, 2000, Study 2).
Time and again we have seen such a pattern. For example, 83 per cent of students forecast that they would buy a daffodil for charity in an upcoming drive for the American Cancer Society, but that only 56 per cent of their peers would. When we check back, we found that only 43 per cent had done so (Epley & Dunning, 2000, Study 1). In a Prisoner’s Dilemma game played in the lab, 84 per cent of participants said they would cooperate rather than betray their partner, but that only 64 per cent would do likewise. The actual cooperation rate was 61 per cent (Epley & Dunning, Study 2).
Accuracy as correlation
But wait, a careful reader might say. People might prove
overconfident about their own behaviour, but surely they know
more about themselves than other people do. This accuracy just
reveals itself in a different way. Namely, if we look instead at
the correlation between people’s predictions and their actions,
we might find a stronger relationship for self-predictions than
for peers. More specifically, people may overpredict the chance
that they will vote. But those who say they will vote will still
be much more likely to vote than those who say they will not.
Forecasts from peers will fail to separate voters from nonvoters
so successfully.
This assertion is plausible, but it surprisingly fails empirical
test. When we look at accuracy from a correlational perspective,
we find that peers at least equal overall the accuracy rates of
those making self-predictions (see also Spain et al., 2000;
Vazire & Mehl, 2008). In one of our voting studies, peers who
received just five scant pieces of information about another
person’s view of an upcoming election predicted that person just
as well (r = .48) as did people predicting their own actions (r
= .51) in correlational terms. Other researchers report similar
findings: All it takes is a few pieces of information for
a peer to achieve accuracy rates that equal the self. The
behaviour can be a performance in an upcoming exam (Helzer &
Dunning, 2012) or performance on IQ tests (Borkenau & Liebler,
1993).
And, if the action is one that people find significant, and if peers are familiar with the person in question, then peer prediction begins to outdo self-prediction. Roommates and parents, for example, outpredict how long a person’s college romance will last, relative to self-prediction (MacDonald & Ross, 1999). Ratings of supervisors and peers outclass self-ratings in predicting how well surgical residents will do on their final surgical exams (Riscucci et al., 1989). Ratings of peers do better at predicting who will receive a promotion in the Navy early relative to self-impressions (Bass & Yammarino, 1991).
Misguided exceptionalism
Taken together, all this research suggests that people tend to possess useful insight when it comes to understanding human nature. But this research also suggests that people fail to apply this wisdom to the self. In a sense, people exempt themselves from whatever valid psychological understanding they have about their friends and contemporaries. Instead, they tend to think of themselves as special, as responding to a different psychological dynamic. The rules that govern other people’s psychology fail to apply to them. We have come to call this tendency misguided exceptionalism.
What is it about their understanding of other people that respondents exempt themselves from? We contend, with data, that people recognise that others tend to be constrained in what they do. There are forces, both internal and external to the individual, which are out of their control but that influence how they behave. The smell of freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies does break people’s willpower.
The opinions of the crowd place pressures on other people to
conform.
But these constraints are for other people. When it comes to our
own behaviour, we tend to emphasise instead our own agency, the
force of our own character, and what we aspire, intend or plan
to do. Relative to others, we believe that our actions are
largely a product of our own intentions, aspirations and free
will (Buehler et al., 1994; Critcher & Dunning, 2013; Koehler &
Poon, 2006; Kruger & Gilovich, 2004; Peetz & Buehler, 2009). We
consider ourselves free agents generally immune to the
constraints that dictate other people’s actions.
Much recent empirical work reveals this differential emphasis for the self. People think their futures are more wide-open and unpredictable, and that their intentions and desires will be more important authors of their futures than similar intentions and desires will be for other people (Pronin & Kugler, 2010). When predicting their own exam performance, people emphasise (actually, too much, it turns out) their aspiration level, that is, the score they are working to achieve (Helzer & Dunning, 2012), but they emphasise instead a person’s past achievement (appropriately, it turns out) in predictions of others. College students consider their future potential – or, rather, the person they are aiming to be – to be a bigger part of themselves than it is in other people (Williams & Gilovich, 2008; Williams et al., 2012). People predicting who will give to charity consider the prediction to be one about a person’s character and attitudes – that is, until they confront a chance to give themselves, in which case they switch to emphasising situational factors in their accounts of giving (Balcetis & Dunning, 2008).
Misunderstanding situations
Ultimately, this misguided exceptionalism and overemphasis on
individual agency means that people fail to apply an accurate
understanding of human nature to themselves, one that would make
their predictions more accurate. People, for example, are
surprisingly good at understanding how situational circumstances
influence people’s behaviour. In one study, we described a
‘bystander apathy’ study to students. Students were shown an
experiment in which a research assistant accidentally spilled a
box of jigsaw puzzle pieces. These students were then asked the
likelihood that they would help pick the pieces up relative to
the percentage of other students who would help. Of key
importance, participants were shown two variations of this basic
situation – one in which they were alone versus one in which
they were sitting in a group of three people.
Those familiar with social psychology will recognise that people
are more likely to help when they are alone rather than in a
group (Latané & Darley, 1970). In the group, people are seized
by the inertia of not knowing immediately whether to help, and
thus taking their cue to do nothing based on the fact that
everyone else, lost in the same indecision, ends up doing
nothing, too. But would our participants show insight into this
principle? Not according to their self-predictions. Participants
stated that they would be roughly 90 per cent likely to help
either alone or in the group. They did, though, concede that
other people would be influenced, and that the rate of helping
would go down 22 per cent (from 72 per cent to 50 per cent)
among other people by introducing the group. Of key import, when
we ran the study for real, we found that placing people in a
group had a 27 per cent impact (from 50 per cent down to 23 per
cent) on actual behaviour. Again, peer predictions largely
anticipated this impact. Self-predictions did not (Balcetis &
Dunning, 2013).
This belief that self-behaviour ‘floats’ above the impact of
situational circumstances and constraints can lead people to
forgo decisions that would actually help them. Consider the task
of staying within a monthly budget. In one study, participants
were offered a service that would provide them with savings tips
plus a constant monitoring of their finance. For themselves,
participants felt the service would be superfluous. It would
have almost zero impact on their ability to achieve their budget
goals. What mattered for them instead was the strength of their
intentions to save money (Koehler et al., 2011).
But, in reality, a random sample of participants assigned to the service was roughly 11 per cent more likely to reach their budget goals. And, a group of participants asked to judge the impact of the service on other people estimated that the service would matter; that others would be 17 per cent more likely to reach their goals. Again, predictions about others better reflected reality than predictions about the self, in that people could recognise the impact of an important situational aid on others, but felt they themselves were immune to those influences (Koehler et al., 2011).
Cultural influences
This overemphasis on the self’s agency suggests possible
cultural differences in the holier-than-thou effect. And,
indeed, such cultural differences arise. It is the individualist
cultures of Western Europe and North America that emphasise
autonomy, agency and the imposition of will onto the environment
(Fiske et al., 1998; Markus & Kitayama, 1991). Far Eastern
cultures, such as Japan, emphasise instead interdependence,
social roles and group harmony – that is, social constraints on
the self. Might those cultures, thus, be relatively immune to
the ‘holier’ phenomenon?
Across several studies, we have found that people from collectivist cultures display much less self-error than did those from individualist ones. For example, young children attending a summer school on Mallorca were asked how many candies they would donate to other children if they were asked, as well as how many candies other children on average would donate.
A week later, the children were actually asked to donate. Children from more individualist countries (e.g. Britain) donated many fewer candies than they had predicted, but those from more collectivist countries (e.g. Spain) donated on average just as many as they had predicted. Both groups were accurate in their predictions about their peers (Balcetis et al., 2008).
Does
the self have any advantage?
Extant psychological research, however, does suggest one area
where this general story about self- and social insight will
reverse. People may be wiser when it comes to predicting the
public and observable actions of others rather than self, but
they do appear to have privileged insight into aspects of the
self that are not available for other people to view. People
know that below the surface of their public appearance is a
private individual who feels doubt, anxiety, inhibition and
ambivalence that he or she may not let wholly come to the
surface (Spain et al., 2000; Vazire, 2010; Vazire & Carlson,
2010, 2011). Of course, this individual does not see this
roiling interior life in others.
As a consequence, people may lack awareness that the what’s inside themselves is similarly churning and stirring within others. Thus, for example, people often consider themselves more shy, self-critical, and indecisive than other people (Miller & McFarland, 1987). College students harbour reservations about excessive drinking, but not recognising that others also feel this same reluctance, they go along with the crowd to excess on a Saturday night (Prentice & Miller, 1993). In a similar vein, college students harbour much more discomfort about casual sex than they believe their peers do, with each sex overestimating the comfort level of the other sex when it comes to ‘hooking up’ (Lambert et al., 2003).
Concluding remarks
Thus, current psychological research suggests that people may be
wise, at least when it comes to understanding and anticipating
other people, but they stand in the way of letting this wisdom
lead to their own enlightenment. However, if research reveals
this problem, it also suggests a potential solution to it. What
we presume about other people’s behaviour and futures is likely
a valuable indicator of what awaits us in the same situation –
and may be much better indicator of our future than any scenario
we are spinning directly about ourselves. When predictions
matter, we should not spend a great deal of time predicting what
we think we will do. Instead, we should ask what other people
are likely to do. Or, we should hand the prediction of our own
future over to another person who knows a little about us.
Whatever we do, we should note that perhaps we are, indeed,
uniquely special individuals, but that it is too easy to
overemphasise that fact. In anticipating the future, we should
be mindful of the continuity that lies between our self-nature
and the nature of others. It is in recognising this continuity
that we realise the path that leads to our wisdom may be
a pretty good path to our enlightenment, too. At the very least,
that thought does remind one of another Chinese proverb that has
survived the centuries, perhaps best indicating its worth – that
to know what lies for us along the road ahead, we should be sure
to ask those coming back.
David Dunning
is at the Department of Psychology, Uris Hall, Cornell
University, Ithaca, New York
Dad6@cornell.edu
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