Better-Than-Average Effect

Category: Social

The tendency to rate yourself as better than the typical person on desirable traits and abilities, even when the math makes that impossible for most of the people claiming it.

How it works

When you judge yourself against "the average person," you are running an unfair contest. Your own side is rich, detailed, and full of good intentions you can actually feel, while the "average" is an abstract statistical ghost with no face and no story. Alicke's work showed the effect gets stronger when a trait is both desirable and something you feel you control, because controllable virtues feel like personal achievements you can take credit for. Motivation piles on top of the information gap: rating yourself above the pack protects your self-esteem, so you do it. The result is a population where the majority sincerely believes it sits in the top half.

Where you'll see it

  • Svenson (1981) asked drivers to rate their own skill and safety against other people in the study. Depending on the sample, between roughly 70 and 90 percent placed themselves in the safer, more skilled half. A large chunk of them were, statistically, kidding themselves.
  • The 1976 College Board survey of about a million students found 70 percent rated their leadership ability above the median, 60 percent put themselves in the top 10 percent for getting along with others, and a flat 0 percent rated themselves below average on that.
  • Ask professors to rate their teaching. In a classic Nebraska survey (Cross, 1977), 68 percent placed themselves in the top 25 percent, and 94 percent said they were above average. The top quarter has room for 25 percent, not 68.
  • Kruger (1999) showed the flip side. On hard skills like drawing or telling jokes, people flip to a below-average effect, rating themselves under the pack, because they anchor on their own struggle and forget everyone else is struggling too.

Where it comes from

The effect crystallized around Ola Svenson's 1981 paper in Acta Psychologica, where both Swedish and American drivers overwhelmingly rated themselves safer and more skilled than their peers. Mark Alicke turned it into a systematic research program with his 1985 study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, showing that self-ratings climbed with a trait's desirability and controllability across 154 trait adjectives. Alicke and colleagues later pinned down a key driver in 1995: the effect shrinks dramatically when the "average person" is replaced by a specific, individuated human you have actually met. The nickname "Lake Wobegon effect" comes from Garrison Keillor's fictional town where "all the children are above average."

How to counter it

Name the competitor. Stop comparing yourself to "the average person" and pick one real, specific person in your domain. Alicke et al. (1995) found the effect collapses once the target has a face and a name instead of being a statistical blur.

Score the trait, not the vibe. Force the comparison onto a concrete metric with a public distribution: your actual sales numbers versus the team median, your commit history, your test scores. Vague self-flattery cannot survive contact with a percentile.

Watch the controllable virtues. The effect spikes on desirable traits you feel you control, like honesty, fairness, or work ethic. When you catch yourself certain you are more ethical or harder-working than most, treat that certainty as a red flag, not evidence.

Ask for the base rate. Before claiming top-half status, ask what fraction of people actually make the cut and whether your evidence would convince a skeptic who does not already like you.

The tell

You describe your own strengths in specific, vivid detail ("I really listen, I read the room") while the people you are beating stay abstract and faceless ("most people," "the average guy"). The asymmetry in detail is the tell.

Related biases

References

  1. Svenson, O. (1981). Are we all less risky and more skillful than our fellow drivers?. Acta Psychologica, 47(2), 143-148
  2. Alicke, M. D. (1985). Global self-evaluation as determined by the desirability and controllability of trait adjectives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 49(6), 1621-1630
  3. Alicke, M. D., Klotz, M. L., Breitenbecher, D. L., Yurak, T. J., & Vredenburg, D. S. (1995). Personal contact, individuation, and the better-than-average effect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68(5), 804-825
  4. Kruger, J. (1999). Lake Wobegon be gone! The "below-average effect" and the egocentric nature of comparative ability judgments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77(2), 221-232
  5. Zell, E., Strickhouser, J. E., Sedikides, C., & Alicke, M. D. (2020). The better-than-average effect in comparative self-evaluation: A comprehensive review and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 146(2), 118-149