How do we know this has anything to do with self-perception? Negative feelings tend to be given more weight—a bad review of a restaurant is much more likely to

How do we know this has anything to do with self-perception? Negative feelings tend to be given more weight—a bad review of a restaurant is much more likely to make you avoid it than a good review is to make you visit it—so people could simply believe that “the average person” is worse (at driving, being honest, &c.) than the true average. If I see several traffic accidents a year, I note that since I haven’t had one, I must be doing better than the nebulous category of “other drivers”. After all, the probability of someone else’s having an accident this year is scrillions of times higher than the probability of my having one, even if every individual driver is about as good as me.