self-deception, you can hardly beat academics. In one survey, 94 percent placed themselves in the top half of their profession. I plead guilty. I could be tied down to a bed in a back ward of some hospital and still believe I am outperforming half my colleagues—and this is not just a comment on my colleagues.
When we say we are in the top 70 percent of people for good looks, this may be only our mouths talking. What about our deeper view? A recent methodology gives a striking result. With the help of a computer, individual photos were morphed either 20 percent toward attractive faces (the average of fifteen faces regarded as attractive out of a sample of sixty) or 20 percent toward unattractive ones (people with cranial-facial syndrome, which produces a twisted face). Among other effects, when a person tries to quickly locate his or her real face, the 20 percent positive face, or the 20 percent negative one, each embedded in a background of eleven faces of other people, he or she is quickest to spot the positive face (1.86 seconds), 5 percent slower for the real face (2.08 seconds), and another 5 percent slower for the ugly one (2.16 seconds). The beauty is that there has not been the usual verbal filter—what do you think of yourself?—only a measure of speed of perception. When people are shown a full array of photos of themselves, from 50 percent more attractive to 50 percent less attractive, they choose the 20 percent better-looking photo as the one they like the most and think they most resemble. This is an important, general result: self-deception is bounded—30 percent better looking is implausible, while 10 percent better fails to gain the full advantage.
I hardly need the above result to convince myself, because if I am in a big city, I experience the effect almost every week. I am walking down the street with a younger, attractive woman, trying to amuse her enough that she will permit me to remain nearby. Then I see an old man on the other side of her, white hair, ugly, face falling apart, walking poorly, indeed shambling, yet keeping perfect pace with us—he is, in fact, my reflection in the store windows we are passing. Real me is seen as ugly me by self-deceived me.
Is the tendency toward self-inflation really universal in humans? Some cultures, such as in Japan and China, often value modesty, so that if anything, people might be expected to compete to show lack of self-inflation. Certainly in some domains modesty rules, but in general it seems that one can still detect tendencies toward self-inflation, including self over other in terms of good and bad. Likewise, as in other cultures, inflation often applies to friends, who are seen as better than average (though less strongly than self in some cultures and more so in others).
By the way, recent work has located an area of the brain where this kind of self-inflation may occur. Prior work has shown that a region called the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) seems often to be involved in processing self-related information. Even false sensations of self are recorded there, and the region is broadly involved in deceiving others. One can suppress neural activity in this region (by applying a magnetic force to the skull where the brain activity takes place), deleting an individual’s tendencies toward self-enhancement (while suppression in other regions has no effect).
An extreme form of self-adulation is found among so-called narcissists. Though people in general overrate themselves on positive dimensions, narcissists think of themselves as special and unique, entitled to more positive outcomes in life than others. Their self-image is good in dominance and power (but not caring or morality). Thus, they seem especially oriented toward high status and will seek out people of perceived status apparently for this reason. Though people in general are overconfident regarding the truth of their assertions, narcissists are especially so. Because they are overconfident, narcissists in the laboratory are more likely to accept bets based on false knowledge and hence lose more money than are less narcissistic people. They are persistent in their delusions as well. They predict high performance in advance, guess they have done well after the fact when they have not, and continue to predict high future performance despite learning about past failure—a virtuoso performance indeed. Calling someone a narcissist is not a compliment—it suggests someone whose system of self-enhancement is out of control, to the individual’s disadvantage.
Derogation of Others