To give a personal example, I suppose I would call myself an above average blogger. Put otherwise, for any skill where “goodness at that skill” doesn’t have an objective, agreed-upon measure, we should expect more than 50% of people to think they’re better than the median, because people optimize for things they care about. We are both, from our own perspectives, above average drivers! Maybe you think a good driver is one who drives safely (and so you drive safely and slowly) whereas I think a good driver is one who gets from point A to point B efficiently (and so I drive quickly but not safely). That said, I don’t think these numbers necessarily point to a bias! That’s because the interpretation of “above average” is left entirely up to the person being asked. Is the quality of a professor’s teaching really so skewed that 94% are above average? But more importantly, do you really think that way fewer people would answer “yes” if you just replaced the word “average” with “median” when asking the question? This has something to it! On the other hand, I don’t think this explains everything. These examples are obvious, but they’re not so different than some of the examples. And more than 90% of people commit fewer felonies than average. For example, more than 99.9% of people have an above-average number of legs. There’s no fundamental reason why you can’t have 90% of people be better than average. But is that true? As Bill Kuszmaul points out, these people aren’t necessarily wrong! Intuitively this seems to suggest that people are prone to vastly overestimate their competence. Ninety-three percent of drivers say they are safer-than-average drivers. Ninety percent of students think they are more intelligent than the average student. Ninety-four percent of professors say they are better-than-average teachers. It is famously the case that almost everyone thinks they’re above average.
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