HOW YOU SEE YOURSELFmuch money they’ve given to charity; to recall voting, when they didn’t;
to remember using a condom when their own diary records show the
opposite to be true; and to say their children walked and talked earlier
than they really did. Such distortions help reduce what psychologists
call “cognitive dissonance”, the uncomfortable feeling of holding
two conflicting thoughts simultaneously, in this case the mismatch
between our benevolent view of ourselves and the reality of how we
actually conduct our lives.
In fact, so keen are we to protect our positive self-image that, according
to Tavris and Aronson, we also change the part we played in former
events. Whereas we tend to attribute our past successes to our own
abilities, we blame our former failures (if we remember them at all) on
circumstances beyond our control. Yet when it comes to assessing other
people’s performances, we apply the opposite rule. No wonder we end up
feeling so superior.
Somewhat paradoxically, even though we employ many mental tricks
to sweeten our self-image, research suggests that most of us find it
uncomfortable when other people have what we feel to be an unrealisti-
cally negative or positive perception of our abilities. Indeed, there is a
distressing complex, identified by the US psychologists Pauline Clance
and Suzanne Imes in the 1960s, known as the Impostor Syndrome, in
Simply the best? In our memories of past exam results, the tendency is to over-
rather than underestimate our successes.