Simultaneously Right and Wrong

In order to handicap, subjects must have an inaccurate assessment of their own abilities. Otherwise, there's no self-esteem to protect. If I believe my IQ is 80, and I get 80 on an IQ test, I have no incentive to make excuses to myself, or to try to explain away the results. The only time I would want to explain away the results as based on some external factor was if I'd been going around thinking my real IQ was 100.

I used to be pretty good at this videogame called Dance Dance Revolution (or DDR for short). I've won several province-level tournaments (both in my own province and in neighboring tournaments), did official internet rankings and ranked 10th place in North America, and 95th world wide.

People would often ask to play a match against me, and I'd always accept (figuring it was the "polite" thing to do), though I had mixed feelings about it. I very quickly realized it was a losing proposition for me: If I won, nobody noticed or remarked upon it (because I was known to be the "best" in my area), but I figured if I ever lost, people would make a big deal about it.

I often self-handicapped myself. I claimed that this was to make the match more interesting (and I often won despite self-handicap), but sometimes I wondered if perhaps I was also preparing excuses for myself so that if I ever did lose, I could blame the handicaps (and probably do so accurately, since I truly believe I could have beaten them in a "fair" match).

I had the fortune of traveling to Japan and a DDR player named Aaron who had ranked top 3 worldwide. He agreed to play a match with me, and I won the match, but it was very obvious to both of us that I had only won because of a glitch in the machine (basically, the game had unexpected froze and locked up, something I had never seen before, but when the game unfroze, I had been lucky and anticipated this before Aaron had).

So after the match, I turned to him, pulled out my digital camera and jokingly said "I can't believe I actually beat you. I gotta get a picture of this." But he had a rather serious look on his face and said something like "No, no pictures." I was a bit surprised, but I put away my camera. We didn't talk about it, but I suspected that I understood how he felt. I often felt like my reputation as the best DDR player in my province was constantly under attack. I figured he felt the same way, except world-wide, instead of provincially.

This reminded me of Carol Dweck's study: http://news-service.stanford.edu/news/2007/february7/dweck-020707.html

It is about having a fixed vs. growth theory of intelligence. If you think that your intelligence is fixed, you will avoid challenging tasks in order to preserve your self-image, whereas people with growth mentality will embrace it in order to improve. Important: never tell a child that it is intelligent.

My first reaction is that the 80-IQ guy needs to carry around a mental model of himself as a 100-IQ guy for status purposes, and a mental model of himself as an 80-IQ guy for accuracy purposes. Possibly neither consciously.

(Is this availability bias at work because I have recently read lots of Robin's etc. writings on status?)

If true, I don't think there's any need to say he "believes" his IQ is 100 when it is in fact 80. We could just say he has at least one public persona which he'd like to signal has an IQ of 100, and that sometimes he draws predictions using this model rather than a more correct one, like when he's guaranteed privacy.

"If I believe my IQ is 80, and I get 80 on an IQ test, I have no incentive to make excuses to myself, or to try to explain away the results."

Really? I think it's pretty common to be (a) not particularly good at something, (b) aware you're not particularly good at it, and (c) nonetheless not want that fact rubbed in your face if rubbing is avoidable. (Not saying this is necessarily a good thing, but I do think it's pretty common.)

I really wonder how this sort of result applies to cultures that don't expect everyone to have high self-esteem. Such as say japan.

Excellent post - it makes me wish that the system gave out a limited number of super-votes, like 1 for every 20 karma, so that I could vote this up twice.

I hope you don't mind, but I did a quick edit to insert "a choice of" before "two drugs to test", because that wasn't clear on my first reading. (Feel free to revert if you prefer your original wording.) Also edited the self-deception tag to self_deception per previous standard.

Looks like it's related to learned helplessness to me.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

If self-handicapping to preserve your self-image with respect to one thing impairs your performance in many situations, then one approach would be to do some very rigorous testing, e.g. if one is concerned about psychometric intelligence, one could take several psychologist-administered WAIS-IV IQ tests on different days.

"Belief in belief in religious faith and self-confidence seem to be two areas in which we can be simultaneously right and wrong: expressing a biased position on a superficial level while holding an accurate position on a deeper level."

This is also relevant for Caplan's model of rational irrationality in political beliefs.

Eliezer: Super-votes is kinda like the system of "Cools" vs "upvotes" on everything2 (http://everything2.com/), where depending on your participation (they have a levels system), you are given a certain number of "Cools" and a certain number of "upvotes". Cools give more points to the user and put the article on the front page for a limited amount of time, upvotes just give the user a point or something.

"In most studies on this effect, it's most commonly observed among males. The reasons are too complicated and controversial to be discussed in this post, but are left as an exercise for the reader with a background in evolutionary psychology"
 

would anyone like to discuss the reasons, thanks for being ambiguous! Appreciate it! 

Last November, Robin described a study where subjects were less overconfident if asked to predict their performance on tasks they will actually be expected to complete. He ended by noting that "It is almost as if we at some level realize that our overconfidence is unrealistic."

I think there's a less perplexing answer: that at some level we realize that our performance is not 100% reliable, and we should shift down our estimate by an intuitive standard deviation of sorts. That way, we can under-perform in this specific case, and won't have to deal with the group dynamics of someone else's horrible disappointment because they were counting on you doing your part as well as you said you could.

No idea the extent to which EY's approval upped this, but what I can say is that I was less than half through the post before I jumped to the bottom, voted Up, and looked for any other way to indicate approval.

It's immediately surprising, interesting, obvious-in-retrospect-only, and most importantly, relevant to everyday life. Superb.

The ideal Bayesian [can] never predict in which direction future information will alter his own estimates, and investors in an ideal stock market, [can] never predict in which direction prices will move

I suggest rewording this, it seems like you are making a different claim than the one you intended. An ideal Bayesian can predict in which direction future information will alter his own estimates.

I have been given a coin which I know is either fair or biased (comes up heads 75% of the time). After a sequence of tosses I have arrived at, say, 95% probability that the coin is biased. The probability I assign to the next toss giving 'heads' is:

p(heads) = 0.95 0.75 + 0.05 0.5 ~= 0.74

There is a 74% chance that I will alter my estimate upwards after this coin toss.

I predict with 95% confidence that should I continue to toss the coin long enough future information will alter my estimates upwads until it reaches ~100% confidence that the coin is biased. Naturally, I predict a 5% chance that my estimates would be eventually altered downwards until they approximate 0%, a far greater change.

The same applies to some stocks in an ideal stock market. For example, some companies may have a limit on their growth potential and yet have some chance of going bankrupt. The chance that these stocks could completley lose value should suggest that they are more likely to go up than to go down for their value to be what it is now.

Can someone suggest a concise replacement for "in which direction" that applies here?

I wondered if this bias is really a manifestation of holding two contradictory ideas (a la belief in belief in belief). I wonder because, when past me was making this exact mistake, I notice that it tended to be a case of having a wide range of possible skill rank coupled with a low desire for accuracy.

If I think that my IQ is between 100 and 80 then I can have it both ways. I don't know that for sure, so I can brag: "Oh my IQ is somewhere below 100." because there is still a chance that their IQ is 100. However, if I am bout to be presented with an IQ test, I am tempted to be humble and say 80, because the test is probably going to prove me wrong in a positive way. That way I get to seem humble and smart, rather than overconfident and dumb.

Why are we surprised that the subjects were still trying to act is high status ways when they weren't being watched? This isn't like an experiment where I'm more likely to steal a candy bar if I'm anonymous. My reward for acting high status when no one is watching, is that I get to think of myself as a high status actor even when other people aren't watching. I always have an audience of at least one person. myself.

Of course, a really self-confident person would still take the inhibiting drug, because they are positive that they are going to ace the test anyway, and doing so while impaired is so much more awesome than while sober.

Excellent post!

Males in the lucky guesser group chose the performance-inhibiting drug significantly more than those in the control group

I managed to guess this; my parents got it wrong. I thought that the control group would feel good about being right, and want it to occur more, whereas the unconfident group would feel (nihilistic? apathetic?), and so take the easy high of the drugs.

I confess I thought that the performance inhibiting drugs were euphoric; I couldn't imagine why anyone would take inhibiting drugs without some beneficial side effects. If this was wrong, I was effectively answering a different credit, so can’t really take credit for my guess.