Why Being Delusional is a Superpower

during the covid lockdown this headline went viral nearly half of men say they do most of the homeschooling three percent of women agree i bring this up not to debate who's right but because it's a great example of something called egocentric bias most people think they do most of the work for example researchers have asked authors of multi-author papers what percentage of the work they personally did and when they add up those percentages the sum is on average 140 percent when couples are asked to estimate how much of the housework they do the combined total is almost always over a hundred percent now you might think this is because people want to appear more helpful than they actually are but that's not it when couples are asked what fraction of the fights they start or how much of the mess is theirs the total is again over a hundred people think they do more of the work but they also think they cause more of the problems so why is this i think it's simply because you experience and remember vividly all of what you do but not all of what everyone else does so naturally you overestimate your own contributions and underestimate others and i think this bias leads us to underestimate the influence of other things on our lives like the role luck plays in our success take hockey players for example if you ask a professional hockey player how they managed to reach the nhl they might mention their hard work determination great coaches their parents willingness to get up at 5am and so on but they probably won't acknowledge how lucky they were to be born in january and yet in many years 40 of hockey players selected into top tier leagues are born in the first quarter of the year compared to just 10 percent in the fourth quarter an early birthday can make you up to four times as likely to be a pro hockey player and the reason for this disparity is presumably because the cutoff date for kids hockey leagues is january 1st those born in the first part of the year are a little older and so on average bigger and faster than kids in their league born late in the year now as they grow up this difference should eventually shrink to nothing but it ...