The Optimal Margin of Illusion
The psychology of self-appraisal
“For a man to achieve all that is demanded of him, he must regard himself as greater than he is.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
A few years ago, a study on online dating found that people tend to reach up the hierarchy toward potential partners who are more desirable than themselves. On average, people pursued partners who are 25% more desirable than they themselves are.
This is consistent with what the psychologist Roy Baumeister has described as the “optimal margin of illusion.” Generally, people believe they themselves are 10-20% better than they really are.
Thus, people might not knowingly pursue individuals who are more desirable than themselves. Rather, they genuinely believe those individuals are in their league. They think they’re aiming for someone of equal attractiveness to themselves.
Consistent with this idea, a study looked at how people inflate their perceptions of themselves. The researchers brought people into their lab to have their photos taken. The researchers then digitally modified these images to varying degrees by making them look more similar to an attractive person or a less attractive person.
So imagine they take your photo (assuming you’re male) and change the image to look just a little bit more like Brad Pitt. Or a bit more like someone much uglier than you.
A few weeks later, the researchers invited the participants back into the lab and showed them either modified or unaltered photos of themselves.
People were asked to identify their true, unaltered photo among an array of images. One image was their actual photo. Others were morphed to be more or less attractive.
Participants were most likely to guess that their true photo was the one that was modified to be 10 to 20 percent more attractive.
This probably matches your own experience. Consider how you react to candid photos of other people compared to candid photos of yourself. We hear our friends say, “Ugh, that’s a horrible photo of me” and we think “No, that photo is fine, that’s what you look like.” But then we say the same thing when we see candid photos of ourselves. So unflattering.
In his book The Social Leap, the evolutionary psychologist William von Hippel has written, “That’s why you don’t like candid pictures of yourself: because they capture what you actually look like, not what you think you look like. You prefer the picture of yourself that caught you at just the right angle, on just the right day, and those are the ones you put up on Facebook, Tinder, or in the company directory.”
This pattern of self-enhancement extends beyond just physical attractiveness.
I’ve written before about the “better-than-average effect.” A large body of research has found that people tend to believe they are more intelligent, trustworthy, and have a better sense of humor than others. A recent study found that people believe they use ChatGPT more critically, ethically and efficiently than others. People think they are better drivers than average, students think they are better students than average, professors think they are better professors than average.
People do inflate their opinions of themselves. But this only goes so far. People in the photo study chose images that were slightly more attractive than the true photo, but only slightly.
Most people see themselves as just a bit better than they really are.
When you meet and speak with someone, how would you like that person to see you? In The Self Explained, Roy Baumeister describes a series of studies consistent with the optimal margin of illusion idea.
For example, one study suggested that we want our conversation partners to see us as slightly better than we see ourselves. Participants preferred conversation partners who held them in slightly higher regard than they held themselves over partners who regarded them in the same way they regarded themselves. Interestingly, participants also preferred conversation partners who regarded them as slightly better over partners who regarded them super-favorably. Because if people have too high an opinion of us, we worry we won’t live up to their lofty expectations.
Most of us would like to believe we are brilliant, charming, physically attractive, and witty. But most of us know we aren’t quite there. So we stretch our self-image to a limited extent but not so much that we are obviously delusional. We rate ourselves as better than is plausible. But not wildly better.
An obvious question is should we view ourselves as being a little bit better than we really are?
I’m reminded here of an idea I learned about ten years ago when I was taking night classes at a community college. The idea was from an intro to sociology course. I miss community college. In some ways, it was actually harder than Yale. Ivy League schools don’t allow their students to fail (that’s why they have 98-99 percent graduation rates). But at community college, people actually do fail classes. There’s also more diversity. The classroom atmosphere is a mix of jail lunchroom and an AA meeting with student ages ranging from 17 to 70. The sociology instructor was the wife of an Army sergeant. She had a short haircut and tattoos and would badmouth capitalism but then describe how grateful she was to be American. She would talk about how gender is a social construct but then say it’s important for a husband’s wife and children to have the same last name as him to strengthen feelings of kinship. A very interesting person. A type of instructor you wouldn’t meet in the sociology department of an expensive university.
Anyway, the idea she told the class about is an old sociology concept called The Thomas theorem:
“If men believe a situation is real, it becomes real in its consequences.”
One example is believing in a toilet paper shortage. Another is soldiers throwing down their weapons and running away because they believe the battle is lost.
Perhaps this also applies to our tendency to self-enhance. If we regard ourselves to be a little bit better than we really are, we can make it into a reality. And accomplish things we otherwise might not have.
I’ve been reading books about Napoleon and watching documentaries about him (I’ve heard the new Ridley Scott movie sucks but I still plan on seeing it). One of his many incredible feats is how he returned from exile and launched an incredible endeavor to reclaim his throne as emperor.
After losing a battle against Prussia, Russia, Saxony, Sweden, and Great Britain, Napoleon was exiled to the Island of Elba. Less than a year later, Napoleon found a way to get back into France. He immediately began going around the country to recruit the troops over to his side again, essentially announcing, “Your emperor is back bitches.” At one point, some French troops were deployed to stop him. Napoleon stepped in front of them, ripped open his coat, and said, “If any of you will shoot his Emperor, here I am.” The men joined his cause.
Self-enhancement probably played some nontrivial role here. Viewed objectively, it would be unreasonable for anyone to think they could have done what Napoleon did. But being unreasonable about one’s abilities might be wise, at least to a certain extent and for certain tasks.
Napoleon was already a Great Man, capital G capital M, but adding an additional 10 or 20% on top of that gave him confidence to accomplish borderline impossible feats.
Napoleon’s confidence and victories fueled one another, creating a positive feedback loop. But as his confidence grew and his self-appraisal strayed too far from reality, victories waned. And then so did his confidence.
After losing a few battles, Napoleon said, "I felt that Fortune was abandoning me. I no longer had the feeling that I was sure to succeed."
The historian John Lewis Gaddis has defined grand strategy as “The study of how to achieve aspirational ends with limited means.”
“Means” here can refer to material resources. But means can also encompass mindset, or how you view yourself. Again, how far this goes is limited. You can only stretch your self-image so much before it becomes too distant from reality or evokes serious doubt and scorn from those around you.
But it is interesting that you can take this immaterial resource (self-image) and magically add an extra 10-20% and get it to work for you. Imagine if money worked this way. Suppose that merely believing you have an extra 20% in your wallet somehow grows the amount of cash you hold.
It doesn’t work for money. But it works for self-appraisal. Believing you are 20% more attractive, or charming, or competent can, at least sometimes, get you a better romantic partner, or job, or reputation than you otherwise would have.
We use our limited means (how you view yourself) to achieve greater ends (whatever our goals happen to be) than we otherwise would have by fudging our self-appraisal just a little bit.
You might be familiar with the idea of “depressive realism,” or the idea that people with depression are more accurate in their self-perceptions.
Recent evidence suggests, though, that this idea might be wrong. A replication attempt found no evidence that depression was associated with more truthful perceptions of the self. I’ve long been skeptical of the depressive realism idea. Depression is associated with cognitive impairment. It seemed unlikely to me that a condition linked to diminished mental ability would somehow also be associated with accurate self-appraisal.
Anyway, back to the question of whether we should dial down our self-image to be more in line with reality.
It depends on what your goals are.
If you want to get a higher paying job, an attractive romantic partner, or a slightly better reputation, then it might be wise to adhere to the “optimal margin of illusion” and think of yourself as a little better than you really are.
As I wrote this post last year:
Rationality is not an end in itself. Rather, it is a tool you can use to achieve any number of objectives. We can choose when to deploy our powers of rationality. And we can choose to refrain from applying it to areas where it is perhaps not best suited.
In some ways, rationality can be self-defeating. If you are feeling joy, you can easily talk yourself out of it. You can change your mood by reasoning your way into misery.
But if you are feeling miserable, good luck trying to talk yourself out of it. It’s not so easy to change your mood by reasoning your way into happiness. It’s not impossible, but it is far more difficult than the reverse.
When rationality becomes entangled in every part of your life, happiness suffers. Does free will exist? Are we just mindless vehicles designed to carry our genes forward? Is love “real” or just a series of chemical interactions in your brain? Does it “make sense” to love your family (or your country) despite your connection being due to an accident of birth? If you start asking whether each and every one of your beliefs, decisions and actions are “rational” or whether they “make sense,” you are setting yourself up to be unhappy. Discussing marital disputes, Jordan Peterson has rhetorically asked, “Do you want to be right, or do you want to be happy?” This question could be applied to other areas of life beyond matrimonial conflicts.
Understand your aims, and deploy your powers of rationality appropriately.
Rationality is required for happiness. But too much rationality—questioning every single aspect of life and attempting to make it all fit into a consistent and coherent configuration—will give rise to a bleak mindset.
I haven’t seen any research on whether sex differences exist for enhanced self-appraisals. My guess is that men probably engage in it more than women.
Years ago I attended a talk about helping women in the workplace. The speaker said something that stuck with me: If a woman sees that a job requires 10 skills and she has 9 of them, she won’t apply. If a man sees a job that requires 10 skills and he has 4 of them, he’ll submit an application.
This is overstated. But not wildly so.
Relative to women, men’s attractiveness is more dependent on their occupational success and earnings. Naturally, men are going to apply for jobs that are a little bit out of reach if it might increase their romantic appeal. Overconfidence, at least for occupational skills, is more intertwined with romantic success for men compared with women.
Relatedly, a newly published study found that compared with women, men are less eager and less likely to share bad news about themselves.
Although men and women are equally likely to share positive information (e.g., receiving a job promotion), men are far less likely to report negative information (e.g., failure to receive a promotion).
This reminds me of other research suggesting that one reason why men don’t visit doctors as often as women, even when they suffer from health issues, is because they don’t want to know about potentially detrimental health issues that could reduce the confidence they project to the world.
The evolutionary psychologist Diana Fleischman has pointed out, “Men often don’t want to tell their romantic partner that they’re sick, or injured, or having difficulties at their job, or anything that indicates a loss of mate value. Because women initiate most breakups, and men don’t want their partner to leave them.”
When health issues get bad enough, though, most men will eventually visit the doctor. Even here, though, it seems like men are less likely to disclose their diagnosed health conditions. There have been several recent prominent cases of the public discovering a celebrity was battling cancer only in the person’s final days or after their death. The comedian Norm Macdonald comes to mind. So does Black Panther star Chadwick Boseman. No doubt there have been cases of famous women keeping their illnesses private, but concealing illness seems more prevalent among famous men.
The tendency to view ourselves through a slightly enhanced lens is not just a quirk of human nature, but a (largely unconscious) strategy that improves our odds of real-world success. It's a delicate balance. Too much self-inflation risks detachment from reality. Too little can undermine our aspirations. A slightly enhanced self-image, grounded in a realistic assessment of your capabilities and limitations, can help you to achieve your most important goals.
I tend to think that self-affirmations are less important than proving to yourself that you can do something through action, but they definitely have their place.
As a child, I was always told “to be confident, act confident.” I put this into practice this week when I played a part in settling an 8 million pound claim in my day job. I sometimes believe I don’t deserve to be in the position I’m in, but believing I’m more confident and competent than what I actually am really helped. Obviously humility is important, but a little bit of faith in yourself doesn’t go a miss either.
Another great piece.
"I haven’t seen any research on whether sex differences exist for enhanced self-appraisals. My guess is that men probably engage in it more than women." My observation is that men reflect more on what women think of them, while women reflect more on how they look compared to other women.