When people are asked to compare their abilities to those of their peers, they predominantly provide self-serving assessments that appear objectively indefensible. This article proposes that such assessments occur because the meaning of most characteristics is ambiguous, which allows people to use self-serving trait definitions when providing self-evaluations. Studies 1 and 2 revealed that people provide self-serving assessments to the extent that the trait is ambiguous, that is, to the extent that it can describe a wide variety of behaviors.
As it happens, I discovered this point in high school; I thought of myself as “the smartest kid at school,” and yet the mental gymnastics required to justify that I was smarter than one of my friends were sufficiently outlandish that they stood out and I noticed the general pattern. “Sure, he knows more math and science than I do, and is a year younger than me, but I know more about fields X, Y, and Z!” [Looking back at it now, there’s another student who also had a credible claim, but who was much easier to dismiss, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he had dismissed me for symmetric reasons.]
Related to section I: Dunning, Meyerowitz,& Holzberg (1989) Ambiguity and self-evaluation: The role of idiosyncratic trait definitions in self-serving assessments of ability. From the abstract:
As it happens, I discovered this point in high school; I thought of myself as “the smartest kid at school,” and yet the mental gymnastics required to justify that I was smarter than one of my friends were sufficiently outlandish that they stood out and I noticed the general pattern. “Sure, he knows more math and science than I do, and is a year younger than me, but I know more about fields X, Y, and Z!” [Looking back at it now, there’s another student who also had a credible claim, but who was much easier to dismiss, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he had dismissed me for symmetric reasons.]