How the Self-Enhancement Bias Gets Pumped Up
Tuesday, September 6th, 2011
Cognitive designers spend a lot of energy understanding, leveraging and mitigating the mental biases that dominate our learning, thinking, decision-making and socializing. While cognitive biases or the rules that make-us-human have been extensively studied, most innovators (except for magician and clinicians that use placebos) have not even scratched the surface of leveraging and mitigating them.
And new insights from research on cognitive biases arrive from various laboratories daily. Take for example, recent research reported by the Association for Psychological Science on the bias to rate ourselves above average. They studied 1600 subjects in 15 culturally diverse countries and found:
“Virtually everywhere, people rate themselves above average. But the more economically unequal the country, the greater was its participants’ self-enhancement.”
This means the self-enhancement bias is likely maximal in the US.
The key question for cognitive designers is: How can we use (leverage or mitigate) this bias to improve a product, service, work process, customer experience, employee development program or other artifact?
