Self Perception

Apparently, a perfect stranger is almost as good at predicting our future actions as we are.

The reason, it seems, is because we give ourselves a halo of importance and ability. We believe that we are far more capable and in control of ourselves than we really are. We are more objective about strangers than we are about ourselves and our loved ones. Our high regard for ourselves actually distorts our perception of ourselves.

Therefore, when we predict our future actions we believe we will be far more ethical, brave and able than we really are. This, not surprisingly, has serious consequences for the choices we make. We end up choosing a course of action that is not actually the most suited for ourselves.

Another interesting little tit-bit: When they gave professional gamblers more and more information about the horses participating in a race their actual ability to predict who was going to win the race didn’t actually improve. The only thing that improved was their belief that they were making the right prediction!

What this means is that we’re not very good at weighing the significance of a certain factor, especially if there are many other factors competing for our attention. When there are only three statistics available, we can do a relatively good job at balancing them against each other and deciding how to weigh them. When the number of variables increases, however, it becomes harder to attach the right weighing and our accuracy does not increase overall.

So what does that mean?

It means that our confidence in making the right decision is much higher than the actual likelihood of us making the right decision. Therefore, it is important to always accept that a decision you’re making has a high chance of being the wrong one. This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t make decisions (indecisiveness is a terrible trait to have, and I should know), but that we should be more willing to alter our decisions as we realise that we’ve made the wrong one.

The best way to deal with our obvious inability to make the right decisions is to be adaptable enough to change our minds when we find out we’re wrong. Unfortunately, this is apparently goes against another human characteristic, as we don’t like to change our minds once we’ve made a decision (we’re all very stubborn, it seems).

If we could fight this, however, then we should have an incredible advantage over those around us. By being more adaptive and accepting of our own faults and wrong decisions should ultimately lead us to make more right decisions.

But of course, I could be wrong about all of this…