Finally, One Area Where We Don’t Think We’re Better Than Others: Remembering Names
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We tend to see ourselves as better than our peers across a whole range of traits and skills. We think we’re more environmentally friendly, morally superior, and more observant than those around us. The bias can even spill over to our perceptions of our loved ones: we overestimate the intelligence of our romantic partners, for instance.
But according to a new study in Psychology and Aging there’s one domain where we don’t see ourselves as “better than average”: remembering other people’s names.
Still, the study raises the intriguing possibility that we may have a more realistic view of our skills when our failures have negative social consequences. “Perhaps if we perceive our memory errors to occur while others are paying attention … we create a more accurate representation of our memory’s fallibility and are less likely to be overconfident in our abilities,” the authors conclude.
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