Lying to oneself may explain why so many people say they are above average. How big is this problem? More than 40 percent of one company’s engineers said they are in the top 5 percent.

Social scientists have long known that we tend to be overconfident when we evaluate ourselves. Here are some highlights of their findings: High school seniors: 70 percent report that they have "above average” leadership skills, compared with 2 percent "below average"; in the ability to get along with others, 25 percent rate themselves in the top 1

They want to look good, even though most surveys are anonymous. This is called social desirability bias.

For example, the fifteen most extraverted women’s faces were merged into one image that reflected what was common to all of them. When judges rated these combined images they were surprisingly good at picking up the correct personality traits, especially for the images of women; the findings suggest, as the physiognomists had argued long ago, that

Irrespective of gender, people rate individuals in high face-ism images as being more intelligent, dominant, and ambitious than individuals in low face-ism images.

Once again, the median might have given you a better sense of how you did in comparison to others, and you might have felt even better about your grade.

The lesson is, unsurprisingly, that attractive people—particularly women—are the hard side of the online dating network.

The upshot is that people tend to be overly optimistic about their relative standing on any activity in which they do moderately well.