You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself (19 page)

The self-serving bias and illusory superiority aren’t limited to thoughts about performance. You also use these mental constructs to perceive how you stand in relationships and social situations. In 1993, Ezra Zuckerman and John Jost at Stanford University asked undergraduates at the University of Chicago to assess their popularity relative to their peers. They took those estimates and compared them with what others reported. They were building on the work of Abraham Tesser, who created self-evaluation maintenance theory in 1988. According to his research, you pay close attention to the successes and failures of friends more than you do to those of strangers. You compare yourself to those who are close to you in order to judge your own worth. In other words, you know Barack Obama and Johnny Depp are successful, but you don’t use them as a standard for your own life to the degree you do coworkers, fellow students, or friends you’ve known since high school. Zuckerman and Jost had students list the number of people they considered friends and then asked if the subjects believed they had more friends than did their peers and more friends than the average student. Thirty-five percent of the students said they had more friends than the typical student, and 23 percent said they had fewer. This better-than-average feeling was enhanced when considering their peers—41 percent said they had more friendships than did the people they considered to be their friends. Only 16 percent said they had fewer. On average, everyone you know thinks they are more popular than you, and you think you are more popular than them.

Sure, some of your faults are just too obvious, even to you, but you compensate for those by inflating what you like most about you. When you compare your skills, accomplishments, and friendships with those of others, you tend to accentuate the positive and eliminate the negative. You are a liar by default, and you lie most to yourself. If you fail, you forget it. If you win, you tell everyone. When it comes to being honest with yourself and those you love, you are not so smart. But self-serving bias keeps you going when the hype machine runs low on fuel.

You spill a drink at a party. You get a mustard stain on your shirt. Your forehead is breaking out on the day you have to do a presentation. Oh no. What will people think? Chances are, they won’t think anything. Most people won’t notice at all, and if they do, they’ll probably disregard and forget your imperfections and faux pas within seconds.

You lose some weight, buy a new pair of pants, and strut through doors expecting some sort of acknowledgment. Perhaps you get a new haircut, or buy a new watch. You spend an extra fifteen minutes in front of the mirror expecting the world to notice. You spend so much time thinking about your own body, your own thoughts and behaviors, you begin to think other people must be noticing too. The research says they aren’t, at least not nearly as much as you are.

When in a group or public setting, you think every little nuance of your behavior is under scrutiny by everyone else. The effect is even worse if you must stand on a stage or go out with someone for the first time. You can’t help but be the center of your universe, and you find it difficult to gauge just how much other people are paying attention since you are paying attention to you all the time. When you start to imagine yourself in the audience, you believe every little misstep is amplified. You are not so smart when it comes to dealing with crowds because you are too egocentric. Fortunately, everyone else is just as egocentric, and they are just as convinced that they are being scrutinized.

The spotlight effect was studied at Cornell in 1996 by Thomas Gilovich, who researched the degree to which people believe their actions and appearance are noticed by others. He had college students put on T-shirts featuring the smiling face of Barry Manilow and then knock on the door to a classroom where other subjects were filling out a questionnaire. When you are late to a class or to work, or walk into a crowded theater or nightclub, you feel as if all eyes are on you, judging and criticizing. These students had to shed their normal clothes for a shirt with a giant Barry Manilow head beaming back out into the world, so Gilovich hypothesized they would feel an especially strong version of the spotlight effect when they had to walk into the classroom. Each person did this, and then walked over and spoke with the researcher for a moment. The researcher then pulled up a chair and told the embarrassed subject to sit down, but right as they did they were told to stand back up and were then led out for a debriefing. They asked the subjects to estimate how many people noticed their shirt. The people wearing the embarrassing attire figured about half of the people in the room saw it and noticed how awful it was. When the researchers then asked the people in the classroom to describe the subject, about 25 percent recalled seeing Manilow. In a situation designed to draw attention, only a quarter of the observers noticed the odd clothing choice, not half. Gilovich repeated the experiment, but this time allowed the students to pick a “cool” shirt depicting Jerry Seinfeld, Bob Marley, or Martin Luther King Jr. In this run, the estimates were the same. They thought about half the class saw their awesome shirt. Less than 10 percent did. This suggests the spotlight effect is strong for both positive and negative images of yourself, but the real world is far less likely to give a shit when you are trying to look cool. Gilovich has repeated his work on crowded New York streets, and although people felt as if a giant spotlight was shining down illuminating their tiny place in the world and all eyes were upon them, in reality, most people didn’t notice them at all.

The spotlight effect leads you to believe everyone notices when you drive around town in a new, expensive car. They don’t. After all, the last time you saw an awesome car, do you remember who was driving it? Do you even remember the last time you saw an awesome car? This feeling extends into other situations as well. For instance, if you are playing
Rock Band
or singing karaoke or doing anything where you feel your actions are being monitored by others, you tend to believe every up and down of your performance is being cataloged and critiqued. Not so.

You will apologize or make fun of yourself in an attempt to soften the blows, but it doesn’t matter. In 2001, Gilovich had subjects play a competitive video game and rate how much attention they thought their teammates and opponents were paying to their performance. He found people paid lots of attention to how they themselves were doing, but almost no attention to others. While playing, they felt like everyone else was keeping up with how good they were at the game.

Research shows people believe others see their contributions to conversation as being memorable, but they aren’t. You think everyone noticed when you stumbled in your speech, but they didn’t. Well, unless you drew attention to it by over-apologizing.

The next time you get a pimple on your forehead, or buy a new pair of shoes, or Tweet about how boring your day is, don’t expect anyone to notice. You are not so smart or special.

I can see right through that politician’s lies. People are such sheep. People are so stupid. People will believe anything. I prefer to lead, not follow.

Have you ever thought like this? Would it blow your mind to know everyone thinks this?

If we all think we aren’t gullible and can’t be swayed by advertising, political rhetoric, or charismatic con artists, then some of us must be deluding ourselves. Sometimes that’s you.

A great many messages among the countless ones bombarding you every day are considered dangerous because they might sway other people or fester in their minds until they act out on the suggestions coming out of all manner of sources, from violent video games to late-night pundit programming. For every outlet of information, there are some who see it as dangerous not because it affects them, but because it might affect the thoughts and opinions of an imaginary third party. This sense of alarm about the impact of speech not on yourself but on others is called the third person effect.

As a modern human, you are bombarded with media messages, but you see yourself as less affected than others. Somehow you have been inoculated against the persuaders, you think, so you have nothing to worry about. You can’t count on everyone else to be as strong as you are, so if you are like most people, there are some voices you think should be quiet. You might even go so far as to think some messages should be censored—not for you, for them.

Who is them? It changes with the zeitgeist. It might be children, or high school kids, or college students. It might be liberals or conservatives. It might be the elderly, the middle-class, the super-rich. Whatever groups you don’t belong to become the groups who you think will be bowled over by messages you don’t agree with.

Studies from the beginning of psychology up until today have revealed many ways in which people truly are affected by hidden persuasion. As you learned in the chapters on priming and the affect heuristic, just about anything you see or hear will in some way influence your later behavior. You tend to accept this as true for everyone but yourself.

Richard M. Perloff in 1993 and Bryant Paul in 2000 reviewed all the studies since researcher W. Phillips Davison first coined the term “third person effect” in 1983. Davison noticed some people saw certain messages in the media as a call to action, not because of what was being said, but because of who might hear it. He pointed to the third person effect as the source of outrage from religious leaders over “heretical propaganda” and the ire of political rulers over some speech out of a “fear of dissent.” Furthermore, Davison saw such censorship as arising out of a belief that some messages might harm “more impressionable minds.” Perloff and Paul found that the third person effect is magnified when you already have a negative opinion of the source, or if you personally think the message is about something you aren’t interested in. In all, their meta-analysis showed the majority of people believe they aren’t like the majority of people.

You don’t want to believe you can be persuaded, and one way of maintaining this belief is to assume that all the persuasion flying through the air must be landing on other targets. Otherwise how could it be successful? Those advertisements for cheeseburgers are for fatties with no self-control, you think, until you are ravenous and are forced to choose between one fast-food place and another. Those alcohol billboards are for trendy hipsters, you assume, until you are at the office Christmas party and the guy at the open bar asks you what you want. Public service announcements about tex-ting while driving are for people who don’t live the kind of life you do, you think, until you find yourself feeling a twinge of shame when you reach for the phone to respond to an e-mail while waiting for the light to turn green.

When you watch your preferred news channel or read your favorite newspaper or blog, you tend to believe you are an independent thinker. You may disagree with people on the issues, but you see yourself as having an open mind, as a person who looks at the facts and reaches conclusions after rational objective analysis. On the other side of the television, networks and producers design programming based on statistics and ratings, on demographic analysis that cuts through the third person effect so you can keep on believing you aren’t the kind of person who watches the shows you watch. You tend to think you are not like the people who live in your town, go to your school, work at your business, and so on. You are unique. You dance to the beat of a different drummer. You fail to realize just by living in your town, attending your school, and working at your job, you
are
the kind of person who would do those things. If you weren’t, you would be doing something else. You might say, “Well, I have to be here. I have no choice,” but you ignore how many of your peers are probably using the same excuse.

The third person effect isn’t limited to advertising or politics. For just about every topic listed in this book there are many people who will read or hear about it and think these delusions and biases affect other people all the time, but not themselves.

The third person effect is a version of the self-serving bias. You excuse your failures and see yourself as more successful, more intelligent, and more skilled than you are. Research into the self-serving bias shows subjects tend to rate themselves as more skilled than their coworkers, better drivers than the average person, more attractive than people their age, and likely to live longer than the people they grew up with. It follows, then, that most people would believe they were less gullible than the majority. But remember, you can’t be in the minority of every category.

When the third person effect leads you to condone censorship, take a step back and imagine the sort of messages people on the other side might think are brainwashing you, and then ask yourself if those messages should be censored too.

Let it out.

Left inside you, the anger will fester and spread, grow like a tumor, boil up until you punch holes in the wall or slam your car door so hard the windows shatter.