Illusion of asymmetric insight

The Misconception: You celebrate diversity and respect others’ points of view.

The Truth: You are driven to create and form groups and then believe others are wrong just because they are others.

The illusion of asymmetric insight is a cognitive bias that involves the fact that people perceive their knowledge of others to surpass other people's knowledge of them. The source for this bias seems to stem from the fact that observed behaviors of others are more revealing than one's own similar behaviors.
Relatedly, people seem to believe that they know themselves better than their peers know themselves and that their social group knows and understands other social groups better than other social groups know them.

Sources: YouAreNotSoSmart and Wiki.

2 comments:

Rummuser | August 23, 2011 at 1:29 PM

It is not a misconception. It is an outright lie.

The truth, as is always the case with truth, is painful reality. The image that we see in the mirror is not what others see of us.

Nema | August 23, 2011 at 10:11 PM

Yup I agree. We'll never see ourselves as others see us, yet, we are self-righteous enough to think that the outsider world is just a fraud as long as it's not "us"!

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