Once you’ve eliminated the unsuitable, do -not- pick the “best”. You’re probably pretty good at identifying what won’t work, but you’re probably pretty terrible at identifying what will.
I didn’t quite understand this, could you please elaborate?
Your ability to judge both yourself, and another person, and how your personalities will interact, is limited. It’s sufficient to identify people with whom you absolutely will not get along, with reasonable accuracy; this is low-hanging fruit. So let’s say you’ve eliminated 95% of the candidate pool by this point.
The remaining 5%? You’re now considering a pool of candidate partners who you can’t immediately eliminate (assuming you have more than one person remaining, after all probably-unsuitable people are eliminated). At this point your list of candidates are people about whom you are uncertain. -Remember- that you’re uncertain.
Or, from a different angle: If you are absolutely certain that a relationship with somebody will work out, that sense of certainty should, due to the Dunning-Kruger effect, be taken as evidence that you should be less certain.
Ok, so why not pick the “best”? This sounds like defeatist to me. You are assuming that the best is probably to good for me, over my league and instead of wasting time and energy on that I should rather focus on more realistic options. Is that it?
No. It’s that you’re probably overestimating your ability to judge which relationship will be the “best” for you. The Halo Effect means, for example, you’ll probably overestimate all the positive qualities of a person, based on one quality that is exceptional (say, physical attractiveness).
I didn’t quite understand this, could you please elaborate?
Your ability to judge both yourself, and another person, and how your personalities will interact, is limited. It’s sufficient to identify people with whom you absolutely will not get along, with reasonable accuracy; this is low-hanging fruit. So let’s say you’ve eliminated 95% of the candidate pool by this point.
The remaining 5%? You’re now considering a pool of candidate partners who you can’t immediately eliminate (assuming you have more than one person remaining, after all probably-unsuitable people are eliminated). At this point your list of candidates are people about whom you are uncertain. -Remember- that you’re uncertain.
Or, from a different angle: If you are absolutely certain that a relationship with somebody will work out, that sense of certainty should, due to the Dunning-Kruger effect, be taken as evidence that you should be less certain.
Ok, so why not pick the “best”? This sounds like defeatist to me. You are assuming that the best is probably to good for me, over my league and instead of wasting time and energy on that I should rather focus on more realistic options. Is that it?
No. It’s that you’re probably overestimating your ability to judge which relationship will be the “best” for you. The Halo Effect means, for example, you’ll probably overestimate all the positive qualities of a person, based on one quality that is exceptional (say, physical attractiveness).