The Idea Shop

I heard an interesting thing in Economics a few days ago that when polled, 80-90% of the population think that they're "above average" drivers. Same results for looks. Supposedly, they look around and say hmm, "well i know i'm no brad pitt or sarah pallin"...but I'm pretty decent. Obviously 80% of people can't be above average.

Odd that our confidence levels seem to be so high according to these tests...almost doesn't seem to stick with what we know about people. Now, I think that these two things are hard for people to self-inspect because people rarely get people telling them how "beautiful/ugly" they are. For drivers, bad drivers just say that they're "aggressive" and not unsafe, while the unbearably slow drivers just claim to be "safe". There are also no ways of quantifying either of them (tickets/horn beeps might, but people justify more tickets with time saved on the commute...so not poor skills but a conscious trade).

Instead, what about intelligence? Would people generally say they're above average when they know they're a C or a B student? Would be interesting to have people comment anonymously with a number between 1-10 with how smart they think they are COMPARED TO THE WORLD. I think we have pretty high average, seeing how this is an "intellectual" blog haha...and it'll be interesting to compare that number to what happens in the next post.