Arthur C. Brooks explains self-enhancement bias, the psychological habit of inflating our own positive traits while downplaying others' strengths. This bias evolved from our ancestors living in groups of 30 to 50 people where status meant survival. Accepting imperfection lets us stop comparing ourselves and actually improve.
Here's the truth. You're not perfect and neither is anybody else. That's incredibly good news because if you accept the reality of your imperfection, you have hope of improving yourself and your life and you'll be happier. That's what we want, right? Now, why would we want the illusion of perfection even if it's wrong? And the answer to that is what we call self-enhancement bias, which is this tendency to exaggerate our positive qualities and compare ourselves favorably with other people. This leads to all sorts of distortions in perception that we want to exaggerate positive qualities so we feel good about ourselves, which gives us this kind of ebullience. This ability to get through the day, Wall will exaggerate the bad qualities of other people so that we feel better in comparison to them. Because it's all comparative. Human beings were evolved to live in a hierarchical group of 30 to 50 individuals. And so the result of it is that you're evolved to feel better about yourself if you're rising in the hierarchy, meaning you have better qualities than they have worse qualities. And so we've developed this psychological bias because of this evolved tendency to want to rise in hierarchies, which we still do today. We're kind of positioning ourselves all the time and looking for ways that we're coming out on top, that we, look a little bit more handsome or beautiful, look a little bit more clever, a little smarter. We're a little bit more right than the other people, and we exaggerate it. That's that self-enhancement bias, which is kind of an illusion. It's a distortion of reality.
