If Christianity gave out fatwas, Nietzsche certainly would have picked one up for his claim that "there was only one Christian, and he died on the cross." While Dawkins might go all 'Joss Ackland’s spunky backpack' over the quote because it's slamming religion, I like it for the realization that people mainly worship themselves.
Freud, who ripped off Nietzsche's ideas, theorised that the mind was constantly at work to protect the ego, exaggerating one's successes, minimising one's failures and misdeeds, and interpreting all sensory input in a way which best serves the need of the ego. Recently, scientists (who no doubt secretly fancy their mums) are warming to Freud's theory, and a fair amount of evidence is amassing in its favour.
'Ponce on the heath'
Around 95 percent of people believe they are better than average drivers. They manage this by clever interpretation: there are several aspects to driving; cornering, parking, not plunging into a river at the request of your Satnav, etc; drivers' brains, without their consent, exaggerate the importance of those aspects they are good at, and ignore the bad, as well as selectively using evidence. When one skilfully negotiates a corner at 100mph, they will see it as proof they are supreme; however, crashing into a lamp-post at 100 mph is, of course, the fault of the lamp-post, the car, or a passing jumbo jet which created an unexpected gravitational effect. This is known as "beneffectance", accepting responsibility for successes, and delegating blame for failures to others or to bad luck. Again Nietzsche was ahead of the game, writing that "no victor believes in chance". People are great at passing the buck, as these quotes from geunine accident reports reveal:
"The pedestrian had no idea which direction to go, so I ran over him."
"I collided with a stationary truck coming the other way."
"A pedestrian hit me and went under my car."
"The telephone pole was approaching fast. I was attempting to swerve out of its path when it struck my front end."
Self-serving mental biases have been demonstrated again and again in experimental settings; in one particularly interesting case, people were put in pairs and set tasks; if told afterwards they had done well, they took the credit, if given negative feedback they blamed the partner. In cases in which the feedback was average, they claimed it was due to a combination of their skill and their partner’s incompetence.
People have too much confidence in their own knowledge and judgements: one experiment gave subjects questions, and asked them to estimate a range of values within which they are 98 percent confident the answer lies, (i.e. I am 98% confident that the number of baths Adolphe I of Luxembourg took in his life was between 500 and 50,000). The result, if people accurately estimate their own knowledge, should have been that 2 percent of estimates were wrong. The actual figure was almost 45 percent.
In a revealing experiment, some people were sold $1 lottery tickets with random numbers on, and others got to pick their numbers. When asked to sell the tickets back, the people with random numbers set a selling price of $1.96, choosers would only sell for $8.67, having convinced themselves that, being so clever, they’d probably picked the right numbers.
The ego’s distortion is also one of the biggest causes of human irrationality; our ability to think logically is corrupted by the need to see oneself in a positive light. When people given intelligence tests were told randomly that they had done either well or badly, and given arguments on the effectiveness of IQ tests at measuring intelligence, 'low IQ' subjects found it a less convincing measure than 'high IQ' subjects.
As well as interfering with one's perception and logic, the ego likes to play with our memories; we remember the good things we've done and forget the bad, and remember past events in a way which casts us in a good light. In one experiment, people were given a quiz, and, when informed of the answers several days later, remembered getting more right than they actually did. When some Princeton students were told that extroverts are more successful, and others were told the opposite, you can guess which group found it easier to remember all the sociable things they’d done, and, as a result, rated themselves as more outgoing.
'Shatner’s Bassoon'
This isn’t a pretty picture. But before you enter a fit of despair and cry all of the water out of your body, or throw up your own pelvis bone, just remember it’s not all bad; the only group who don’t suffer these delusions are the clinically depressed, so it’s actually a pretty useful error.
More details of these studies, and further reasons why people are just shit, can be found in Cordelia Fine’s excellent book A Mind of its Own.
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