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).