Chapter 11: Social Psychology Pt. 1

Thank you David. Good to talk with you again.

We are continuing to talk about a few topics involving the self. And I really like the way that you've written about this in your book because it's a good way to capture this whole huge body of research in social psychology by simply saying the way that we think about ourselves is fundamentally different than the way we think about other people.

Yeah, I use that as an organizing principle in part because your field, the field of social psychology is so broad. Social psychology includes everything from the famous Milgram experiment, how willingness are willing people to obey, how willing are they to comply. Social psychology often connects to personality psychology and how to break people's personalities up, which we'll talk about at a different time. And then there's issues like priming, which we'll also get to today, which is our whole different avenue of research. But I think that the core of social psychology is the question of how do we see ourselves and how do we see others? How do we make sense of this? How do we make sense of those bizarre categories of people, types of people, individual people? And then the interesting question is are there systematic ways in which we see ourselves different from other people? And I think there's a lot of evidence suggesting the answer is yes.

It makes sense that we would find that there are all these ways in which when we think of ourselves, we think differently than when we think of other people. For one, we have access to large aspects of our own cognition. So I know all of my intentions and desires and wishes know, have my memories. I think of myself as that complex person. All I have about you is what you tell me and what I see you do.

It's a big difference. We've talked about Freud and Freud complicates things. So Freud says maybe we don't know as much about ourselves as we think we do. Maybe some of our views about ourselves are in fact mistaken. We think we're doing something for one reason, it's for another. Maybe our memories have been distorted through repression and so on. But there's still a big difference. We have a big fight. We're yelling at each other. I know why I'm yelling at you. I know exactly what's going on in my head. At least I had a strong belief that, well, you wronged me in this way. I also had a hard day and you really touched the nerve of what you said and so on. All I see is you yelling. And so for me, I have access for you. I make inferences. And that's the big difference. Take it. Even in a similar case, we each bite into some food. Well, how do I know what I'm feeling? Well, I get the senses of the sensation food. How do I know what you're thinking? Well, I look at your facial expressions, I listen to what you tell me. What could be more different?

The example that I always come to is one that you talk about in your book, which social psychologists refer to often as the planning fallacy. So I go home over Thanksgiving break. I'm a sophomore in college. Every time I would go home for Thanksgiving break, I would pack my bag full, I would swear that I was going to study for my midterms or whatever it was. And every time I would bring that same backpack unopened back to campus and think to myself, why did I even bring know to stress myself out? When I look at it, there is some cool research showing that if you asked anybody else is David going to study over Thanksgiving break? They would probably say no. Yeah, because they've seen this happen time and time again. I somehow am too stubborn because I know that I'm intending to this time. I know I really value being the kind of person who would study over Thanksgiving. All of these things are infusing my own judgment in a way that they don't infuse others.

My example is whenever I travel and this is time before iPads and Kindles and so on, I would bring books. But I would bring so many books. I'd fill my suitcase with books. It's a three day trip and my suitcase is laden with books. And of course I'm on a flight and I watch the movie and I read the Inflight magazine and I get to my hotel room and I watch TV. The book was unread. And the OD thing is you'd think that would happen once and then I would learn, but it just seems to stick. Danny Kyleman, who's this great, of course sage of rationality in our field, has a wonderful line saying that everything takes longer than you expect even when you take into account the planning fallacy.

Right? That's true. I talk about one study in which you ask college students to estimate when they're going to finish their senior thesis. The researchers ask them to give whatever the date that they normally expect and then to give their just like their worst estimate if everything were to go wrong, if all of the things that you think are going to happen actually don't happen. Right. When do you think you'll actually turn in your thesis? And so they adjust something like three weeks later and the results are that everybody is always like two weeks later than that. Right?

Yeah.

The worst scenario they can imagine, still not as bad as their actual behavior.

What's interesting is this huge asymmetry. So I fall for this myself all the time. But when I'm telling my student and my student is student has very late in getting things in and then he says to me I'll get you to paper in two weeks. This time I'm going to do it. I say to myself, no, you aren't. You never get things. It's always much longer. This is, I think, a general fact. We're hypersensitive and kind of accurate to the flaws of other people and often ignorant of our own.

So this is one example of a whole set of findings that we might put under the umbrella of positive illusions or self enhancing illusions. Is that consistently and robustly? We find that people think of themselves as better on any number of dimensions, on any number of traits than other people.

So this is a Lake Wobagon effect, the better average effect. Do you want to run through some examples?

Yeah, sure. So if you ask professors, how good are they at teaching compared to the average professor, 90% of them or something like that say that they're better than average. Of course, I always tell my students what's very weird is that I actually am better.

Somebody got to be the number 90%, right? This is true even when are you a better driver, a better friend, better sense of humor? And these tend not to be subtle effects. People just tend to think they're better than average in everything. And you could argue that there's a fuzziness to the question, different ways to interpret and so on.

Right. In fact, there is some good research by my former colleague here, David Dunning, that shows that people sometimes construct what he calls idiosyncratic trait definitions. And this is what allows them to have this view that they're better than others. And what this means is if I say, how smart are you? You might think, well, smart means practical intelligence and smart means street smarts, and I am high on that, and so therefore I'm smarter than most people. Whereas somebody else might say, well, I'm book smart, I do well on tests. And that's their definition of intelligence. And if you do constrain those definitions, you get some of that effect going away. But as you say in the book, by no stretch does that remove the effect.

That's right. There's a study, I think it's by Chris Chabri, but I know it's discussed in a book by Dan Simons and Chris Chabri The Invisible Gorilla about chess players. And what's interesting there is there's a ranking that chess players have, and an extraordinary amount of chess players believe their real ranking is much higher than the ranking they've been given based on their win loss thing. So they're much better than what the thing says they are. Which puts you in OD position that when two players of equal ranking play one another, each is confident that they have a substantial advantage over the other one.

That's actually hilarious, and that is a case of a very constrained score, right. Like, I assume that there's a simple equation.

That's right. I have an example of the above average finding, which may or may not stay in this podcast, but it's done by somebody on Twitter who does polls on unconventional things named Ayla, and she did a very simple poll. She said, Is your penis larger than average or smaller than average? And overwhelmingly, most people on our poll said their penises were larger than average. It's salacious, but it's probably clever because there's typically an aspect of oneself that's fairly hidden. You asked about noses or how tall you were. You have plenty of validation, but this is something where you just for the most part, it's a judgment call.

Importantly, I don't think that people are lying. There's plenty of evidence to show that they really believe it. This poll doesn't show it's anonymous. Right? It doesn't.

It's totally anonymous. You just click on it.

So it's not like you're publicly reporting, because in some cases, obviously, people might lie to make themselves appear better. But no, this is in your own private thoughts. This is the way that you categorize the social world. You just end up on top.

I've always wondered if self enhancement bias doesn't just apply to ourselves. It applies to those that we love. So there's another study that says that people strongly, they also believe their partners have IQs and other abilities that are above average. And certainly most loving parents think their kids, oh, my kid is really the sharpest and the handsomest and so on. And I've often wondered whether this is a true belief or just something one says because it makes the kid feel happy, because it's a way of expressing your love. So I sometimes wonder what you do if you make the person sort of put their money on it.

Right? I think they've shown plenty of times that people will put their money where their mouth is for their own abilities, but whether they'll do it for their kids. I suspect yes, but I don't know. What do you think?

I suspect yes too. I think we talk about perception. We talk about bottom up and top down, and bottom up is the world. Top down is your expectations and what you want to believe. And to some extent, how