Egocentric Bias: Psychology Term Review #4
The word “Ego” and the word “Centric”; now those are two words no one ever wants to be accused of! Why, that is practically a nightmare scenario! Me? Egocentric? Bah…. no not me. Let me tell you why I am right though on this topic. How am I so confident on this topic? Well, I have gone through a lot of experiences that kinda relate to this. Oh, you are an expert? I really think my perspective is much more right despite you offering a different opinion and insight based off of a lot of experience on a topic I don’t have much knowledge or experience of. (Paragraph is Sarcasm if you couldn’t tell)
Egocentric Bias is defined as: the tendency for an individual to rely too heavily on one’s own perspective and/or have a higher opinion of one’s self than reality merits. Egocentric Bias comes as a result of the reality that every individual has a vast amount of information they know about themselves that others are not privy to. Because there is such a huge amount of information about the self each individual has, this can lead to an a disproportionate weight and influence given to the self’s views, knowledge, and opinion on various kinds of topics/judgement/experiences. This social psychology effect sees a lot of cross over with the Dunning-Kruger effect that we just talked about in the previous article here.
Egocentric Individuals give an extra weight to their opinion and views, and as a result of this there is often a precedence unconsciously to validate the self’s current beliefs as well as avoiding something that will prove the Egocentric mindset wrong. This can often lead to conflict where an Egocentric individual believes they are “100% right”. Often times these individuals completely shut out other people’s opinions while they completely dominate the conversation. In laymen’s terms, I will dub Egocentric Bias as the “I appreciate What the Mirror is Telling Me” phenomena.
A great example I will borrow was from iresearchnet . I am paraphrasing below to keep the example clean and simple, but beware that I borrowed the example and modified it for the classic “Bob” format I like to use.
Bob walks into work. Bob is told he will be starting a new project with Jack and Jill. All three are working on the same project. That project is marketing a new project. Bob feels like he is contributing more than his counter-parts. At the end of the project, Bob’s boss asks how much Bob, Jack, and Jill felt that they contributed relative to their fellow co-workers. Bob knows he has done a lot, for sure more than Jack and Jill.
After all three reported the percentage they felt they contributed relative to each other, it added up to a total of 150% (A common average value research showed when using 3 people and asking them how much they felt they contributed to a project) . Shocking, the total is over 100%, which is obviously not possible and clearly indicates that someone on the team felt they contributed a lot more than in reality.
Why does this happen? Why do individuals claim a higher percentage than they might have contributed?
This is the critical part.
People have an easier time remembering their own inputs than those of others. The time and ideas that Bob invested into the project is much more prominent and easy to remember for Bob than how Bob remembers Jack and Jill contributed to the project. As a result of this, Bob’s view of his contributions to the project was inflated compared to what reality was in actuality.
Zach is deep into a conversation with his friend discussing why a certain view on a political policy is right. In this case, his friend said the policy was “wrong” for various reasons. Zach knows he must be right. “I am more educated on this topic than he is. He needs to do his research. It seems absurd that he can’t see my point. Its all so simple . His lens is so one sided. I am very open-minded to his ideas and he is not!“
Zach my be suffering from the classic case of Egocentric Bias.
A great quote from Craig D. Lounsbough I think particularly applies to Egocentric Bias.
“To declare myself as a genius immediately evidences that I am not.”
Powerful words.
It has also been proven in various studies Egocentric Bias leads to memory distortion. Memory Distortion is the neurological phenomena of making events seem larger than life in the mind to feed the ego. Sometimes to the point where fake or exaggerated events are created in the mind. If you are thinking something like , “That must mean story tellers are somewhat egocentric” you may be somewhat right, but lets be careful not to make any blanket statements.
To some extent, there is such thing as a healthy amount of Egocentric Bias, because in someways it is very close to a good relative of it known as “confidence” . It is critical that we are always making sure whenever we are in a discussion, we must understand that what we see our knowledge and understanding as is most likely inflated from reality. It is also critical to understand that your lens is more than likely very, very different from others you interact with.
Finally, being able to spot Egocentric Bias is an extremely powerful skill to have. If you can identify this in individuals, you can save yourself from hours of arguments with someone who may 100% truly believe your point is null and that their view is 100% right. Take this as a word of caution, I am not saying don’t engage in valuable discussion with people. The worst thing you could do is go around and blame everyone as having egocentric bias!
Anyways, thanks for reading everyone! This topic was a little bit simpler and a lot easier to understand! Hope you enjoyed! This was Psychology Term Review #4 on Egocentric Bias. You can find me on twitter here.
References:
- Gilovich, T., Medvec, V. H., & Savitsky, K. (2000). The spotlight effect in social judgment: An egocentric bias in estimates of the salience of one’s own actions and appearance. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 211–222.
- Ross, M., & Sicoly, F. (1979). Egocentric biases in availability and attribution. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 37, 322–336.
Wikipedia & ireasearch.net!
