Psychologically Speaking – ‘The Over Inflated Ego’

Dr. Stewart Hase remains one of the most entertaining and challenging speakers you are likely to encounter. He likes to challenge all of us here at BTB all of the time – more often than not he’s on the money. The issue to ego and the role it play’s within all of us has never been better described than it is here.

Despite being a great fan of evolutionary explanations for many phenomena, I have to admit that plovers provide evidence for a contrary view. Apart from having wings and an ability to engage in successful aerial combat with alien spacecraft, they appear to like walking around on the ground most of the time. More telling is that they choose to lay their eggs on terra firma and in the silliest of places. You can see the eggs on the side of roads, on lawns, and in the middle of golf fairways with no effort to camouflage at all.  Mind you, it may be the case that they do eventually become extinct in the face of rampaging lawnmowers and other urban predators.

When confronted by these predators, plovers put up quite a fight, out of all proportion to their size and ability. Their first line of defence is to make a huge racket with that ear-piercing squawk of theirs that can break crystal glass at 50 meters. And, no matter the size of the adversity or the noise it is making, they’ll dive bomb until the threat has gone. Sadly, though, they are little match for the average weekend warrior and his Victor two stroke!

The sense that they can take on all comers is not restricted to plovers of course- I was once attacked by a feisty duck protecting its brood as I jogged along the Iluka waterfront: it was trying to snap my Achilles tendon. Somehow, it too had an inflated sense of self. Humans are not so different, although a tad more complicated, in the way in which we interpret ourselves in relation to the world.

We have a universal habit it seems, of over-estimating our ability in a whole range of ways.  When asked to compare ourselves to the rest of our group we are prone to rate ourselves as well above the average. For example, people will put themselves in the top quarter of the population when it comes to driving ability.  You don’t need to be bookie to know that there is something wrong with probability theory here.

The same effect is found with judging our popularity, athletic prowess, academic performance, teaching ability, getting on with others, and, yes you guessed it, being immune to bias.  It seems that managers overestimate their management and leadership skill when comparing themselves to peers: sadly their salaries are similarly disproportionally high. The old boys club of directors and CEOs share the same illusion that they are worth more than they are.

When it comes to ability it is a bit more complicated and scary. People who are incompetent at a task are more likely to judge themselves as better than average, whereas, the highly competent tend to underrate themselves. The same can be said of intelligence and cognitive ability in general. Smart people see themselves as less intelligent whereas the intellectually challenged see themselves as being smarter than the average bear.  For some reason, this talk of competence and intelligence makes me think about politicians, shock jocks and all the other opinionated others who we allow (yes, we let them) to operate from this illusion of superiority.

Martin Seligman, a psychologist famous for his work on the causes of depression, once opined that depressed people had a more realistic appraisal of life than crazy optimists. While he might be right, optimism and self-flattery have far more survival value when it comes to motivation and achieving goals. It is also helps on the happiness front too. Even though we are likely to be coy when someone tells us how good we are, secretly the optimists believe it. Go the plovers’.