It may have to do with the manner you bring it up—it’s not hard to see how saying something like “X is amazing” could be interpreted “X is amazing...and you’re not” (after all, how often do you tell your friends how amazing they are?), in which case the bias is some combination of status jockeying, cognitive dissonance and ego protection.
Wow, that’s seems like a very likely hypothesis that I completely missed. Is there some piece of knowledge you came in with or heuristic you used that I could have used to think up your hypothesis?
I’ve spent some time thinking about this, and the best answer I can give is that I spend enough time thinking about the origins and motivations of my own behavior that, if it’s something I might conceivably do right now, or (more importantly) at some point in the past, I can offer up a possible motivation behind it.
Apparently this is becoming more and more subconscious, as it took quite a bit of thinking before I realized that that’s what I had done.
It may have to do with the manner you bring it up—it’s not hard to see how saying something like “X is amazing” could be interpreted “X is amazing...and you’re not” (after all, how often do you tell your friends how amazing they are?), in which case the bias is some combination of status jockeying, cognitive dissonance and ego protection.
Wow, that’s seems like a very likely hypothesis that I completely missed. Is there some piece of knowledge you came in with or heuristic you used that I could have used to think up your hypothesis?
I’ve spent some time thinking about this, and the best answer I can give is that I spend enough time thinking about the origins and motivations of my own behavior that, if it’s something I might conceivably do right now, or (more importantly) at some point in the past, I can offer up a possible motivation behind it.
Apparently this is becoming more and more subconscious, as it took quite a bit of thinking before I realized that that’s what I had done.