THE ROUGH GUIDE TO PSYCHOLOGYsuch thing as negative outcomes in psychotherapy. This blindspot was
further exposed in a striking study by Michael Lambert and colleagues.
They asked forty clinicians to predict which of their collective pool of
five hundred patients would deteriorate in therapy. Even though the
researchers warned the clinicians that a fairly typical proportion would
be eight percent, the clinicians predicted stubbornly that virtually no
patients would be worse off after therapy. The stark reality was that forty
subsequently deteriorated.
Indeed, our tendency to delusional self-glorification is now so widely
supported by psychological findings that the phenomenon has attracted
its own name – the “Lake Wobegon Effect”, after the broadcaster Garrison
Keillor’s fictional town where “the women are strong, the men are good-
looking, and all the children are above average”.
Rose-tinted spectacles
All this self-adoration is well and good, and perhaps a select few have
been blessed and are actually as wonderful as they think they are. But
for the rest of us it surely leaves a question begging: how on earth do we
continue to hold ourselves in such high esteem in the face of our inevi-
tably slow, and at times painful, progress through life, from lost jobs to
romantic rejections? It turns out that our inflated egos are supported by
a highly selective and manipulative memory. It’s as if each of us has our
very own memory spin doctor, on hand to present us to ourselves in the
best possible light.
Take people’s memories of the grades they achieved at school. When
Harry Bahrick and colleagues asked 99 students to recall their grades,
the majority of errors were in the direction of grade inflation. Can’t
remember whether you scored an A or B in that exam? It was bound to
be an A, or so your memory spin doctor tells you.
Or consider people’s recollections of past health checks. Robert Croyle
and his collaborators asked hundreds of participants to recall their
cholesterol test results from several months earlier. Guess who was most
likely to deflate their cholesterol score? That’s right, participants with
higher, more unhealthy, cholesterol ratings were more likely to distort
their scores downwards.
According to the social psychologists Carol Tavris and Elliot
Aronson, authors of the book Mistakes Were Made (but not by me), there’s
an almost limitless supply of research providing similar examples.
Studies have apparently shown people’s tendency to overestimate how