Negative Counterparts
Although more academic attention has focused on positive illusions, there are systematic negative illusions that are revealed under slightly different circumstances. For example, while college students rate themselves as more likely than average to live to 70, they believe they are less likely than average to live to 100. People regard themselves as above average on easy tasks such as riding a bicycle but below average on difficult tasks like riding a unicycle (Kruger, 1999, as cited in Sedikides and Gregg, 2008). The latter effect has been recently named the "Worse-than-average effect". In general, people overestimate their relative standing when their absolute standing is high and underestimate it when their absolute standing is low.
Read more about this topic: Positive Illusions
Famous quotes containing the word negative:
“Coming out, all the way out, is offered more and more as the political solution to our oppression. The argument goes that, if people could see just how many of us there are, some in very important places, the negative stereotype would vanish overnight. ...It is far more realistic to suppose that, if the tenth of the population that is gay became visible tomorrow, the panic of the majority of people would inspire repressive legislation of a sort that would shock even the pessimists among us.”
—Jane Rule (b. 1931)