We seem to be great at understanding and predicting other people’s behaviour but not so good at applying this understanding to ourselves. Surely we should be better at predicting our own behaviour?
What’s going on?
An article in the June 2013 edition of The Psychologist sheds light on this oddity. David Dunning works at a Cornell University lab which has spent the last 20 years conducting research in this area.
Dunning found that people tend to think that they engage in more socially desirable behaviour than their peers. But when it comes to the crunch predictions about others behaviour are way more accurate than predictions about themselves. For example, he asked students how likely they were to donate to a forthcoming charity campaign and how likely their peers were to make a donation. He found that 83% reported that they would make a donation but just 56% of their peers would. After the charity campaign he found that only 43% had made a donation, which is nowhere close to the 83% who predicted that they would make a donation. Individuals predicted that they would be much more generous than they were in reality.
Exploring this further Dunning’s research found that others are able to make more accurate predictions about an individual’s behaviour than the individual can. For example, friends and parents were better able to predict how long a romance would last than the people in the romance. Same also goes for job promotion and performance in exams.
Why are we so poor at predicting our own behaviour?
Most of us have a good, and fairly accurate, grasp of the situational factors that predict other people’s behaviour. What leads to our poor predictions of our own behaviour is that we believe we’re above the influence of these situational factors. For example, we think that we have more will power than others and are more able to resist temptations. When predicting others exam performance we’ll consider their past performance, but when considering our exam performance we’ll consider our aspirations and future potential. We tend to be overly positive in our ability to rise above a situation and its constraints. We tend to think that the rules that apply to others behaviour don’t apply to us don’t affect us.
So what can we do about this?
When predictions are important to us we should ask ourselves what other people are likely to do and then follow this advice. Alternatively we could ask people who know us to predict what we might do.
How are you going to apply what you’ve just read?
Or… are you thinking what I’m thinking…. surely this research doesn’t apply to me because I’m a master of my own destiny and an exception to the research findings outlined above 😉
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