How competent are you compared to your colleagues? Interesting patterns emerge when psychologists approach teams of colleagues with this question differently. If people have a truly realistic view of their abilities, their self-esteem should typically be intermediate. Rather, psychologists have repeatedly found that people’s self-esteem is exaggerated. In fact, superstars and underachievers alike tend to think they’re better than they actually are.
This effect is an example of a positive illusion. That is, the cognitive bias of feeling that you are more capable, more blessed, luckier, or better than you are. For many people, positive illusions seem intuitive and rational. Some scholars argue that these illusions are fundamental to our species’ survival. To live life, they reason, one must remain optimistic, work hard, be successful, live long and produce offspring.
[Read more about the better-than-average bias]
Of course, there are those who do not experience positive fantasies and have a more realistic self-assessment. Unfortunately, such self-assessments can make you feel inadequate when you compare yourself to many other people with very positive self-assessments. These comparisons can be an important source of imposter syndrome, the suspicion that you don’t deserve your credit. In other words, imposter syndrome can be the dark side of societal norms for positive selves.
However, there is an important caveat to this discussion. The available evidence is based almost exclusively on a small segment of the human race called Westerners. If positive illusions were truly essential for our species, we would expect it to be universal. But my research, and that of other research teams, suggests otherwise.
In the early 1990s, a colleague and I started the “Culture and Self” project to investigate how our sense of self varies across cultures. We found no strong evidence of better-than-average effects or other positive illusions in East Asia. For example, in Japan, when university students were asked about the percentage of their classmates who were superior to them in various characteristics and abilities, the average estimate dropped by about 50 percent.
In our latest research field, cultural neuroscience, we found that the neural pathways that underpin positive fantasies are absent in certain communities. In other words, patterns that most psychologists have seen as universal in humans are rather cultural products.
Most of the psychological databases are from so-called WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Affluent and Democratic) societies. Most scientists in psychology and other academic fields come from strange cultural backgrounds. Therefore, the popular view that positive illusions are universal in humans is based on heavily biased research.
To transcend this bizarre cultural perspective, my colleagues and I directly compared the responses of Westerners and East Asians to self-inquiry questions. A study published last year found that Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, Both American and Taiwanese participants judged how good or bad they felt in the face of success or failure. Americans reported feeling better about success than feeling worse about failure. Taiwanese participants, on the other hand, did not show such positive illusions. Instead, they reported feeling worse when they failed than when they succeeded. This response from Taiwanese participants may reflect another psychological tendency, called negativity bias, in which negative events have a much stronger emotional impact than positive ones.
So we went one step further from previous research by monitoring brain waves as people make these decisions. Specifically, we investigated the magnitude of alpha waves, which are activity patterns that appear when the human mind wanders and falls into inward thinking. We observed the alpha effect when Americans think of themselves within seconds of knowing something good has happened to them. This early attention predicted the magnitude of their positive fantasies. Taiwanese participants did not show this pattern when thinking about successes or failures that happened to them, nor did they show evidence of positive fantasies, as mentioned above.
In East Asia, humility is culturally respected. As such, some Western psychologists argue that East Asians hide their true feelings in order to avoid appearing too self-centered, citing the absence of positive illusions. tried to explain. However, our data show that this explanation is inaccurate. For example, among the Taiwanese participants in our study, we found no additional brain activity that correlated with efforts to hide their true emotions.
On the contrary, Westerners go the extra mile to feel even better when something good happens. They voluntarily maximize good feelings about themselves through automatic neural responses. It happens in the blink of an eye without any effort, much less thought or conscious strategy. Such reactions may seem natural and inevitable, but they are not. Rather, the response is cultural and has been shaped through years of socialization. The brain is extensively trained to produce this response to support attitudes that value self-promotion and spontaneity and help individuals adapt to an individualistic culture. East Asians do not exhibit such spontaneous or automatic responses. They will become more accepting as different events happen to them. Other studies we have conducted have found that self-esteem predicts health in Western societies but does not produce the same results in East Asian societies.
When considering these results, it is important to recognize that the results for cultures or communities as a whole are nuanced. Even within a given group, people can vary greatly. As mentioned earlier, some people in the West experience imposter syndrome, which can be particularly problematic given the normative emphasis in this culture on feeling positive about oneself. This example shows why you can’t assume that all Westerners and East Asians follow a certain pattern. But broadly speaking, when we see trends like this in our research, we have the opportunity to learn more about how culture shapes brains and behavior.
We believe that cultural differences in positive illusions are examples of broader cultural differences in how we interpret ourselves. Western society generally considers the self to be independent. As a result, people in these societies want to feel good about themselves. They work hard to recognize their own abilities and uniqueness. However, in many non-Western cultures, people see themselves as interdependent and embedded in social relationships. They feel protected and secure when connected to the larger social community. From that cultural perspective, you don’t have to feel particularly good about your independent, personal self.
These differences are the source of all kinds of misunderstandings. From a Western perspective, East Asians may appear overly polite in their attention to social connections, and may be isolated or depressed by their ambivalence towards self-promotion and spontaneity. It may seem maladjusted. However, our data show that East Asians react to events naturally and realistically without overthinking. From an East Asian point of view, the Western tendency to promote good feelings about oneself is a wasteful, unnecessary, Or maybe even considered childish. However, our data suggest that it helps Americans adapt to their culture and thus boosts positive self. Taken together, by adopting a cultural neuroscience approach, we may be able to move away from cultural biases and prejudices and thereby move our science away from ethnocentrism.
Taking a step back, this piece highlights the power of culture. Humans are the only animals that have survived by creating and using different customs, customs, meanings and social institutions. The evolution of these things, commonly called ‘cultures’, has accelerated, especially over the last 10,000 years, and today forms several major cultural spheres. These zones differ widely, and cultural differences in the positive illusion represent a single, albeit important, part of the more general process by which our culture shapes the way we think, feel, and act. An example. We know what our culture is. But we don’t fully understand the forces that shape that psyche.
Are you a scientist specializing in neuroscience, cognitive science, or psychology, and have you read a recent peer-reviewed paper that you would like to write about Mind Matters? Submit your suggestions Scientific AmericanMind Matters Editor Daisy Juhas Pitch Mind Matters@gmail.com.
This is an opinion and analysis article and the views expressed by the author are not necessarily those of the author. Scientific American.
