This is my 33rd blog post. My blogging process starts with writing a short summary of the idea for the post. Then I research. If the research supports the idea, I write the first draft. I rewrite until it feels right. Linda and or a co-worker named John proofread my posts prior to publishing. I usually end up publishing the third draft.
Less than half of the short summaries I write up get past the research stage. Even most of the ideas that survive the research stage get drastically modified because the research does not support some of my assumptions.
For example, I had an idea based on an assumption that about 25% of the population watched Fox News. After looking it up, I discovered only about 2.3 million people (0.7% of the population) watch any part of prime-time Fox News on a given night. My assumption of 25% was off by a factor of 35, only 0.7% actually watch it. Which is why I have never posted about the Fox News’s propaganda machine. It gets blamed for a lot of the bad in the country but the reality is less than 1% of the country actually watches Fox News.
This happens to me over and over again. The premise of an idea for a new post ends up not being supported by the facts. I have a college education. I have read tons of books. I have a couple decades experience as an analyst. For 15 or more years, several days a week, I have read information from multiple established news organizations. Before I started blogging I was confident that my opinions were in the range of being well supported by the facts. However, once I started fact-checking myself, I soon discovered my assumptions about most things are often off by an order of magnitude or more.
It was and still is disconcerting to realize so many of my assumptions about the world were way off. Was I losing my mind? Was old-age taking its due? I am 65 and time does march on, like it or not. Am I an idiot? Just plain stupid? Maybe the information I looked up was consistently wrong. No matter the cause the process was taking a toll on my self-esteem. I had hard evidence that my assumptions about the world are often wrong.
So I was going to write about the importance of having self-confidence even when that self-confidence is being challenged by reality. In doing that research is when I ran into the concepts of the false consensus effect and the false uniqueness effect.
False consensus effect is where we overestimate the extent (feel there is a consensus) to which our opinions, beliefs, preferences, values, and habits are normal and typical of those of others. The false consensus effect is important to our self-esteem. When we feel like a normal person it is much easier for us to feel good about ourselves. Unfortunately often when confronted with evidence that we are not normal (a consensus does not exist), many of us assume that those who do not agree with us are defective in some way.
False Uniqueness Effect is our tendency to over-estimate how uncommon certain of our abilities and traits actually are. In other words, we tend to think we are more special than we really are because we have an ability to do this or that thing. It is important to our self-confidence up to a point. It makes us big headed beyond that point.
So think about this for a minute. We, which includes me, think we are both more normal and more special than we really are. We thus make assumptions about the world that are biased by both the false consensus and false uniqueness effects. So then if you fact-checked your assumptions like I started to do when I started blogging, you would likely discover, as I did, that those assumptions are often wrong.
The reality is we each have abilities at which we are better at than some other people but that does not make us unique in our abilities. If you are in the top 5% in IQ, 4% of the population has an IQ higher than you do.
The reality is that the combination of our opinions, beliefs, preferences, values, and habits actually does make us each unique. When is the last time you were at a restaurant and everyone around you ordered the exact same thing as you did?
There is no language you can speak which is spoken by most people on earth. There is no religious faith you can have which is shared by most people on earth. There is no type of food you can like which is liked by most people on earth. No matter what age you are, most people on earth are not your age. There is no lifestyle you can have which most other people have.
Do you personally know anyone who behaves and believes identically as you do? Do you know anyone who has the exact same likes and dislikes as you? How about someone who has the exact same opinions as you do? Even identical twins who were raised together develop differences in their behaviors. We might know some people with similar backgrounds with similar tastes as we do, but clearly, even then, there are plenty of individual differences.
All humans are of one species. Genetically we are very similar too one to another. That said, behaviorally, emotionally, intellectually, etc. virtually none of us are the same, one to another. There are 7.6 billion people on the planet, all of us are unique individuals. Again there are 7.6 billion people on the planet no matter what your abilities are, there are many others with similar or better abilities. Sure there are world champions but odds are, you are not one of those.
It has taken me a couple months to get my head around the above, however, I have to say I feel like I am in a better place. I now realize my uniqueness is what actually makes me normal. I also feel like my goal is to feel confident and comfortable in my abilities more than to pretend that somehow I am or should be the best at them.
I can say this, fact-checking one’s self will tend to make one humble.
What we perceive often depends on how close we look.
Scaleandperception.com