Response bias or “response style” is the keyword for phenomena like these. “Extreme responding” or “extreme response style” are terms for gravitating away from the neutral option.
I don’t know if there’s research on whether this is correlated with overconfidence.
Thanks for the link! I was aware that this style exists, but the correlates are interesting. Seems that the “extreme/mild” style is correlated with:
culture (Middle East, Latin America: extreme; East Asia, Western Europe: mild);
intelligence and education (stupid, uneducated: extreme; smart, educated: mild);
but also the wording of the question.
The intelligence/education link seems obvious in hindsight, but that is an illusion because if someone told me the opposite conclusion, I would have a good “explanation” for that, too.
There is probably some relation to the Dunning-Kruger effect, only instead of abilities here we have personality traits. In D-K, most people seem to have the mild response; believe themselves to be somewhat more average than they really are.
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I am generalizing from one example, but I would assume that most people “feel normal” from inside. Like, if you are X, relative to the population average, it sometimes doesn’t feel like you are X, it just feels like too many people are non-X. This would create a mildness bias.
For example… I am highly intelligent, but I don’t actually feel so, because for every problem I can solve, there are ten problems I can’t solve, and hundred problems where I don’t even understand the fucking question.
Apparently, some people are the opposite of this. If they are X, they feel “super X”. Actually, that kinda reminds me of some people.
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I could even imagine an opposite bias, where people who are X feel like they are “anti-X”. Like, if you ask a paranoid person whether they are careful enough, it might remind them of many security precautions they didn’t take. Mindkilled people would probably consider themselves more objective than average; scrupulous people more sinful, etc.
Response bias or “response style” is the keyword for phenomena like these. “Extreme responding” or “extreme response style” are terms for gravitating away from the neutral option.
I don’t know if there’s research on whether this is correlated with overconfidence.
Thanks for the link! I was aware that this style exists, but the correlates are interesting. Seems that the “extreme/mild” style is correlated with:
culture (Middle East, Latin America: extreme; East Asia, Western Europe: mild);
intelligence and education (stupid, uneducated: extreme; smart, educated: mild);
but also the wording of the question.
The intelligence/education link seems obvious in hindsight, but that is an illusion because if someone told me the opposite conclusion, I would have a good “explanation” for that, too.
There is probably some relation to the Dunning-Kruger effect, only instead of abilities here we have personality traits. In D-K, most people seem to have the mild response; believe themselves to be somewhat more average than they really are.
*
I am generalizing from one example, but I would assume that most people “feel normal” from inside. Like, if you are X, relative to the population average, it sometimes doesn’t feel like you are X, it just feels like too many people are non-X. This would create a mildness bias.
For example… I am highly intelligent, but I don’t actually feel so, because for every problem I can solve, there are ten problems I can’t solve, and hundred problems where I don’t even understand the fucking question.
Apparently, some people are the opposite of this. If they are X, they feel “super X”. Actually, that kinda reminds me of some people.
*
I could even imagine an opposite bias, where people who are X feel like they are “anti-X”. Like, if you ask a paranoid person whether they are careful enough, it might remind them of many security precautions they didn’t take. Mindkilled people would probably consider themselves more objective than average; scrupulous people more sinful, etc.