HOW YOU SEE YOURSELFsomeone who has say, fifty friends, than with someone who has just one
friend. Indeed, fifty people will be in the position of having this friend
who has fifty friends. By contrast, just one person will be in a position of
having the one-friended friend as their friend. In other words, popular
people get counted in lots of people’s tallies of how many friends their
friends have, whereas unpopular people get counted only very rarely.
All this conspires to make it a statistical fact, in Feld’s words, that “most
people have fewer friends than their friends have”. The same logic
applies to sexual relations. People are often upset to discover their part-
ner’s prolific sexual history and yet, on average, you’re far more likely to
be sleeping with someone who has had numerous sexual partners than
you are to be sleeping with someone more chaste.
Even psychologists aren’t immune from habitual self-aggrandizement.
Investigations of therapy outcomes show that, on average, approxi-
mately ten percent of clients will get worse following therapy. But far
from being aware of their fallibility, a survey by Charles Boisvert and
colleagues of 181 practising psychologists across the United States found
that an alarming 28 percent were completely ignorant of there being any
You don’t know your own head size
You’re not as big-headed as you think. It’s not that you’re modest – far
from it, as the main text makes clear. No, literally, the size of your head
is probably smaller than you think it is. Ivana Bianchi at the University
of Macerata asked students to draw the outline of their own heads as
accurately as possible. The students overestimated their own headsize
by 42 percent, on average, from memory and by 8 percent with the
help of a mirror. By contrast, overestimates of other people’s headsizes
were 24 percent from memory and 10 percent with the head in view.
When the students used a measuring tape to indicate the height of
their heads, the estimates overshot by 18 percent, compared with
13 percent for other people’s heads. So, whether drawing or using
the measuring tape, participants’ estimates for their own head sizes
tended to be larger than their estimates for other people’s heads.
It’s unlikely this heady distortion is a recently acquired form of self-
ignorance. The researchers also compared head size in classic portraits
and self-portraits dating from the fifteenth to twentieth century. You
guessed it, head size was bigger in the self-portraits. Bianchi’s team
confessed to not really knowing why people overestimate their head
size, although they’re now researching the possibility that it reduces
the risk that we will get our head stuck in a hole!