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> Ninety-three percent of drivers say they are safer-than-average drivers. Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel prize for studying these types of cognitive biases,

> Ninety-three percent of drivers say they are safer-than-average drivers. Daniel Kahneman, who won a Nobel prize for studying these types of cognitive biases, has a really good explanation for this. The human mind has a strong tendency to invisibly substitute hard questions for easy ones. When faced with a difficult question like "what are this company's future prospects?", we tend to subconsciously answer an easier question like "do the founders of this company appear competent and confident?" This, not arrogance, is the main reason why so many rate themselves as above average at common tasks. Truly ranking yourself is pretty cognitively difficult. You have to construct a mental model of the full range of driving ability in the population, then place yourself in it. So almost everybody substitutes the much easier question "am I good driver?" instead of "am I an above average driver?". And the reality is most driver, even those slightly below average are basically good drivers. In other skills though, where most people perceive themselves as not good, the effect is flipped. For example well over 50% of people will rate themselves as below average when you ask them about their ability to strike up a conversation with strangers.

alain94040 6y ago
Another cognitive bias at play is that people are bad at statistics. I'm a great driver. I make a mistake maybe once a year (and I apologize for it by waving my hand). Whereas every day on my commute to work, I see a bad driver doing something dangerous. Guess what, I drive by more than 365 cars on my commute, so my stats are actually no better than everyone else. But it feels like it.
- Archelaos 6y ago
  Your numbers need to be adjusted: I reckon you are not observing the 365 cars during the whole time-span you are commuting.
  - leafmeal 6y ago
    I'm confused... why don't you believe they could drive past 365 cars during their commute?
    - hervature 6y ago
      They are saying you can't simply drive past the 365 cars. You need to observe those 365 cars for the entirety of your commute. Otherwise comparing 365 drive by comparisons to your 365 commutes isn't exactly the same.
      - DavidSJ 6y ago
        It’s an ironic error in a comment about being bad at statistics. :) And no shade intended by that. We might all have made an error like this.
        heavenlyblue 6y ago
        Quoting one of the comments in this thread: “maybe you don’t yourself notice your own mistakes in the first place”
      - caterama 6y ago
        So, it’s more like you observe somewhere in the range of 5-10 cars for the duration of the commute depending on how densely you’re surrounded on average? That’s really interesting, and if you see 1 mistake per commute, then the average driver is actually quite a bit worse than the gp assumed!
        tfehring 6y ago
        The unit I'd use is car-minutes. In a 30-minute commute you might observe 200 car-minutes (this is a total shot in the dark to be clear) closely enough to notice a mistake if it happened. So if you notice 1 mistake per commute on average, and you yourself make a mistake every 200 minutes of driving, you could estimate that you're an average driver.
  - julianlam 6y ago
    And why not? In some commutes, if you enter a busy freeway you'll be passing by tens of cars a minute.
- retzkek 6y ago
  > I make a mistake maybe once a year That you know of. How many mistakes do you suppose you make that you aren't aware of? Or maybe not even a real mistake, but a perceived "mistake" as seen by the other driver? I suspect the latter happens far more often than real mistakes, due to information asymmetry - I know exactly what I am doing and intend to do, while I can only guess and infer what you're doing, beyond the very meager data provided by brake lights and turn signals. If your real behavior differs from my expectation, I call you a bad driver who made a mistake, while you really did nothing wrong.
Geminidog 6y ago
>This, not arrogance, is the main reason why so many rate themselves as above average at common tasks. Truly ranking yourself is pretty cognitively difficult. You have to construct a mental model of the full range of driving ability in the population, then place yourself in it. So almost everybody substitutes the much easier question "am I good driver?" instead of "am I an above average driver?". And the reality is most driver, even those slightly below average are basically good drivers. It's completely wrong to attribute to this to something other than cognitive bias. It's totally cognitive bias although arrogance is too strong of a word. You can see the dissonance in psychological experiments where people rate each other AND themselves. People who rate you will rate you significantly lower than what you rate yourself. This phenomenon appears consistently across multitudes of psychological experiments and is very very repeatable. This happens in experiments where the questions posed are quantitative but not Binary like you arbitrarily constructed in your examples. For example rate this persons programming skills from 1 - 10 is a typical question arising from this experiment. You also mentioned how difficult it is to rate yourself. Difficulty is irrelevant in the experiments above as all the humans participating in the experiment will be rating the same thing (yourself) making the difficulty not a factor in the rating as it is the same for all people doing the rating. I would say that your post itself is an example of this cognitive bias, you literally pulled that "binary question" logic out of thin air. Where is your experimental evidence? What made you place this logic above other forms of equally valid logic but counter to your point? Likely you have a subconscious agenda and your reasoning you presented could represent an arbitrarily constructed scaffold of logic to prop up a world view that makes sense to your cognitive bias. Surely if what I said was true you would never know it and likely you will be pulling more logic out of thin air to deconstruct what I said. That being said there exists a spectrum of people in the world. The article points out that roughly 90% of people will rate themselves higher than what they actually are. What about the remaining 10% What does psychology say about people who don't lie to themselves? Experiments have found that people who lie to themselves are experimentally more happier and more successful overall than people who don't, in fact many people who can't lie to themselves actually fit the diagnoses of being clinically depressed. It is not a case of arrogance, I agree with this, it is more of a case of the fact that we lie to ourselves to be happy. (Arrogance is a negative word that delivers the wrong connotation, but the most accurate way to put it, is people are arrogant because they need to lie to themselves in order to be happy).
sushisource 6y ago
Overall I agree, and you write a good comment, but: > And the reality is most driver, even those slightly below average are basically good drivers. Made me laugh out loud. Not even necessarily because it isn't true (though I'd tend to disagree), but just because I'm the kind of person who constantly complains about shit drivers. Thanks for the laugh, lol.
- Der_Einzige 6y ago
  I get pissed off about trash drivers too all the time, but you have to be realistic. These bad drivers are NOT the norm. You will pass many hundreds of cars on a 1 hour drive. You do not mentally file in "oh look at that random car with the good driver in it" the same way that you mentally file "yet ANOTHER bummwer driver not using their turn signals!" on your commute. People who are "slightly below average" basically are good drivers, especially since this class includes a significant proportion of soccer moms.
  - lovegoblin 6y ago
    > especially since this class includes a significant proportion of soccer moms. What's the relevance here, exactly?
  - eyelidlessness 6y ago
    I’m disappointed this is grey at my viewing time. This is spot on, and speaks to a common (confirmation) cognitive bias so commonly cited here I’d think it would be recognized.
- dragonsky 6y ago
  When you consider the complexity of the act of driving I'd say a majority of people driving are pretty good drivers, the alternative would be a significant accident rate resulting in impassable roads.
  - sushisource 6y ago
    I mean you're not wrong, but you could say the same thing about breathing or walking. They're complicated on some level, but we do them just fine. To me this is really a point about just how good the interface of wheel/pedals is, that any moron off the street can be taught to drive in a matter of hours.
diehunde 6y ago
I think ranking yourself is difficult when you're actually average or below average. If you have a successful career or you have done things not many people have, that's pretty much empiric evidence that you are above average.
- HappyDreamer 6y ago
  Also, one might not understand if the things someone else is doing, is mediocre or really bright, when one doesn't understand the topic well, oneself. Let's say someone X cannot understand much mathematics -- then, if someone else, person Q, solves a quadratic equation, and person F solves, say, Fermat's Last Theorem, then, it's not easy for X to know that F is extraordinarily talented (right?) whilst Q is more likely an ordinary person. Because to X both problems are equally hard -- namely impossibly hard. Instead, like @dcolkitt indicated, X will look at how Q and F dress (better looking = better at mathematics), and which one has the most self confident voice? (However in things like sports, when one clearly sees who, say, is the fastest runner, then it's simpler of course.)
- cycomanic 6y ago
  But above average in what? I would say that a significant portion of my career success has been luck. I know several people whom I consider much better (and smarter) at many (most) aspects of what I do, but have not had the same career. That missed out, due to circumstance, luck, sometime some aspect of their personality etc.. So yes having a successful career (i.e. an above average career) in a field might only mean that one is above average at having a successful career. A pretty circular conclusion.
  - diehunde 6y ago
    That's why I also mentioned "done things not many people have done". I was referring to professional accomplishments such as getting published, speaking at conferences, invent something that other people use, etc. You can try thinking of people that did all of that by pure luck but that's not the norm.
    - 6y ago
darkerside 6y ago
I maintain that most people are better than the mean average driver. Some drivers are so terrible that they drag down the curve, and the majority of us step over it.
- HappyDreamer 6y ago
  Better than the average driver, but maybe not the median driver
  - gowld 6y ago
    "average" is "mean", "median", or "mode" depending on context.
    - earthboundkid 6y ago
      One of the great things nerds do is take a piece of ordinary language, turn it into jargon, and then get mad at you for using it as ordinary language instead of jargon. From now on, I say "means" means "means in ordinary language" and if you use "mean" to mean "means in jargon" you're wrong and I will get mad at you online.
      - eyelidlessness 6y ago
        I like this rule and fully subscribe to your newsletter[1] [1] Saying this as someone who’s neurodivergent, took to overly specific language as a way to understand the world at a young age, learned that people find it irritating to be corrected when you can infer their meaning in context, and grew to share that annoyance. Also saying this as a hobbyist linguistics nerd fully on the descriptivist side of the fence.
      - solipsism 6y ago
        Then they write blog posts explaining the real meaning of things, and they post them to HN, and legions of people will read the post and "learn something new", only to go and inflict their enlightenment on everyone around them.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
nullsense 6y ago
I'm a below average driver for sure. I'd say somewhere around the 33rd percentile.
m463 6y ago
When it comes to driving, I'm reminded of couple who visit Las Vegas. They separate for a while and when they reunite and compare notes he gets mad "You lost $200 gambling!!" she replies, "Yeah, but last year you lost $3000!" "Yeah, but the difference is, I know how to gamble!"
sobani 6y ago
Another part of the driving equation is that we judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intentions. "I barely swerved when I got distracted by my child" vs "That asshole almost ran me off the road. On purpose!"

alain94040 6y ago

Another cognitive bias at play is that people are bad at statistics. I'm a great driver. I make a mistake maybe once a year (and I apologize for it by waving my hand). Whereas every day on my commute to work, I see a bad driver doing something dangerous. Guess what, I drive by more than 365 cars on my commute, so my stats are actually no better than everyone else. But it feels like it.

Archelaos 6y ago
Your numbers need to be adjusted: I reckon you are not observing the 365 cars during the whole time-span you are commuting.
- leafmeal 6y ago
  I'm confused... why don't you believe they could drive past 365 cars during their commute?
  - hervature 6y ago
    They are saying you can't simply drive past the 365 cars. You need to observe those 365 cars for the entirety of your commute. Otherwise comparing 365 drive by comparisons to your 365 commutes isn't exactly the same.
    - DavidSJ 6y ago
      It’s an ironic error in a comment about being bad at statistics. :) And no shade intended by that. We might all have made an error like this.
      - heavenlyblue 6y ago
        Quoting one of the comments in this thread: “maybe you don’t yourself notice your own mistakes in the first place”
    - caterama 6y ago
      So, it’s more like you observe somewhere in the range of 5-10 cars for the duration of the commute depending on how densely you’re surrounded on average? That’s really interesting, and if you see 1 mistake per commute, then the average driver is actually quite a bit worse than the gp assumed!
      - tfehring 6y ago
        The unit I'd use is car-minutes. In a 30-minute commute you might observe 200 car-minutes (this is a total shot in the dark to be clear) closely enough to notice a mistake if it happened. So if you notice 1 mistake per commute on average, and you yourself make a mistake every 200 minutes of driving, you could estimate that you're an average driver.
- julianlam 6y ago
  And why not? In some commutes, if you enter a busy freeway you'll be passing by tens of cars a minute.
retzkek 6y ago
> I make a mistake maybe once a year That you know of. How many mistakes do you suppose you make that you aren't aware of? Or maybe not even a real mistake, but a perceived "mistake" as seen by the other driver? I suspect the latter happens far more often than real mistakes, due to information asymmetry - I know exactly what I am doing and intend to do, while I can only guess and infer what you're doing, beyond the very meager data provided by brake lights and turn signals. If your real behavior differs from my expectation, I call you a bad driver who made a mistake, while you really did nothing wrong.

Geminidog 6y ago

>This, not arrogance, is the main reason why so many rate themselves as above average at common tasks. Truly ranking yourself is pretty cognitively difficult. You have to construct a mental model of the full range of driving ability in the population, then place yourself in it. So almost everybody substitutes the much easier question "am I good driver?" instead of "am I an above average driver?". And the reality is most driver, even those slightly below average are basically good drivers. It's completely wrong to attribute to this to something other than cognitive bias. It's totally cognitive bias although arrogance is too strong of a word. You can see the dissonance in psychological experiments where people rate each other AND themselves. People who rate you will rate you significantly lower than what you rate yourself. This phenomenon appears consistently across multitudes of psychological experiments and is very very repeatable. This happens in experiments where the questions posed are quantitative but not Binary like you arbitrarily constructed in your examples. For example rate this persons programming skills from 1 - 10 is a typical question arising from this experiment. You also mentioned how difficult it is to rate yourself. Difficulty is irrelevant in the experiments above as all the humans participating in the experiment will be rating the same thing (yourself) making the difficulty not a factor in the rating as it is the same for all people doing the rating. I would say that your post itself is an example of this cognitive bias, you literally pulled that "binary question" logic out of thin air. Where is your experimental evidence? What made you place this logic above other forms of equally valid logic but counter to your point? Likely you have a subconscious agenda and your reasoning you presented could represent an arbitrarily constructed scaffold of logic to prop up a world view that makes sense to your cognitive bias. Surely if what I said was true you would never know it and likely you will be pulling more logic out of thin air to deconstruct what I said. That being said there exists a spectrum of people in the world. The article points out that roughly 90% of people will rate themselves higher than what they actually are. What about the remaining 10% What does psychology say about people who don't lie to themselves? Experiments have found that people who lie to themselves are experimentally more happier and more successful overall than people who don't, in fact many people who can't lie to themselves actually fit the diagnoses of being clinically depressed. It is not a case of arrogance, I agree with this, it is more of a case of the fact that we lie to ourselves to be happy. (Arrogance is a negative word that delivers the wrong connotation, but the most accurate way to put it, is people are arrogant because they need to lie to themselves in order to be happy).

sushisource 6y ago

Overall I agree, and you write a good comment, but: > And the reality is most driver, even those slightly below average are basically good drivers. Made me laugh out loud. Not even necessarily because it isn't true (though I'd tend to disagree), but just because I'm the kind of person who constantly complains about shit drivers. Thanks for the laugh, lol.

Der_Einzige 6y ago
I get pissed off about trash drivers too all the time, but you have to be realistic. These bad drivers are NOT the norm. You will pass many hundreds of cars on a 1 hour drive. You do not mentally file in "oh look at that random car with the good driver in it" the same way that you mentally file "yet ANOTHER bummwer driver not using their turn signals!" on your commute. People who are "slightly below average" basically are good drivers, especially since this class includes a significant proportion of soccer moms.
- lovegoblin 6y ago
  > especially since this class includes a significant proportion of soccer moms. What's the relevance here, exactly?
- eyelidlessness 6y ago
  I’m disappointed this is grey at my viewing time. This is spot on, and speaks to a common (confirmation) cognitive bias so commonly cited here I’d think it would be recognized.
dragonsky 6y ago
When you consider the complexity of the act of driving I'd say a majority of people driving are pretty good drivers, the alternative would be a significant accident rate resulting in impassable roads.
- sushisource 6y ago
  I mean you're not wrong, but you could say the same thing about breathing or walking. They're complicated on some level, but we do them just fine. To me this is really a point about just how good the interface of wheel/pedals is, that any moron off the street can be taught to drive in a matter of hours.

diehunde 6y ago

I think ranking yourself is difficult when you're actually average or below average. If you have a successful career or you have done things not many people have, that's pretty much empiric evidence that you are above average.

HappyDreamer 6y ago
Also, one might not understand if the things someone else is doing, is mediocre or really bright, when one doesn't understand the topic well, oneself. Let's say someone X cannot understand much mathematics -- then, if someone else, person Q, solves a quadratic equation, and person F solves, say, Fermat's Last Theorem, then, it's not easy for X to know that F is extraordinarily talented (right?) whilst Q is more likely an ordinary person. Because to X both problems are equally hard -- namely impossibly hard. Instead, like @dcolkitt indicated, X will look at how Q and F dress (better looking = better at mathematics), and which one has the most self confident voice? (However in things like sports, when one clearly sees who, say, is the fastest runner, then it's simpler of course.)
cycomanic 6y ago
But above average in what? I would say that a significant portion of my career success has been luck. I know several people whom I consider much better (and smarter) at many (most) aspects of what I do, but have not had the same career. That missed out, due to circumstance, luck, sometime some aspect of their personality etc.. So yes having a successful career (i.e. an above average career) in a field might only mean that one is above average at having a successful career. A pretty circular conclusion.
- diehunde 6y ago
  That's why I also mentioned "done things not many people have done". I was referring to professional accomplishments such as getting published, speaking at conferences, invent something that other people use, etc. You can try thinking of people that did all of that by pure luck but that's not the norm.
  - 6y ago

darkerside 6y ago

I maintain that most people are better than the mean average driver. Some drivers are so terrible that they drag down the curve, and the majority of us step over it.

HappyDreamer 6y ago
Better than the average driver, but maybe not the median driver
- gowld 6y ago
  "average" is "mean", "median", or "mode" depending on context.
  - earthboundkid 6y ago
    One of the great things nerds do is take a piece of ordinary language, turn it into jargon, and then get mad at you for using it as ordinary language instead of jargon. From now on, I say "means" means "means in ordinary language" and if you use "mean" to mean "means in jargon" you're wrong and I will get mad at you online.
    - eyelidlessness 6y ago
      I like this rule and fully subscribe to your newsletter[1] [1] Saying this as someone who’s neurodivergent, took to overly specific language as a way to understand the world at a young age, learned that people find it irritating to be corrected when you can infer their meaning in context, and grew to share that annoyance. Also saying this as a hobbyist linguistics nerd fully on the descriptivist side of the fence.
    - solipsism 6y ago
      Then they write blog posts explaining the real meaning of things, and they post them to HN, and legions of people will read the post and "learn something new", only to go and inflict their enlightenment on everyone around them.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

nullsense 6y ago

I'm a below average driver for sure. I'd say somewhere around the 33rd percentile.

m463 6y ago

When it comes to driving, I'm reminded of couple who visit Las Vegas. They separate for a while and when they reunite and compare notes he gets mad "You lost $200 gambling!!" she replies, "Yeah, but last year you lost $3000!" "Yeah, but the difference is, I know how to gamble!"

sobani 6y ago

Another part of the driving equation is that we judge others by their actions and ourselves by our intentions. "I barely swerved when I got distracted by my child" vs "That asshole almost ran me off the road. On purpose!"