When I was a boy, I was small, smart and sensitive. As a good father, my dad did his best to help me develop the manly virtues. As part of this process, I was sent to basketball camp to develop my skills and build character. I was a terrible player with no skill and no interest in the sport. I much preferred reading to shooting hoops. But I tried to do the best I could within the limits of my abilities. This virtue has proven very useful over the years.
During one drill, the coach called for the best player to run to the center of the court. Immediately all the other boys jumped up and ran. Having an honest understanding of my relative skills, I remained seated. The coach had excellent self-control, and I saw the surprise on his face for only a split second—in retrospect, I am sure I was the first boy to ever do that as we are always supposed to think of ourselves as the best, especially when we are not. I am not sure how the original plan was supposed to play out, but the coach had to do something. He made us all do pushups and I had to do twice as many as everyone else. The coach really did do his best to make us better but had probably never had to deal with my brand of weirdness.
Even at the time I thought this was an odd exercise. It seemed to be aimed at encouraging self-deception and that seemed, even to the young me, wrong. The other boys blamed me (correctly) for the pushups, and this made me even more of an outsider at camp. I knew better than to discuss this with the other boys, but the incident has obviously stuck with me.
While the coaches did their best to improve my skills, when I tried out for the basketball team in high school the coach said they had an important position for me, that of manager. When I said “coach, I have to do a sport” he said, “go out for winter track…they take everybody.” He was right, although winter track did have its own hierarchy. Before the season, the coach put everyone through a series of tests to see what they were good at, with sprinting and jumping events being the most prestigious. Those without any discernible talents became distance runners. That is how I became a distance runner. While not great in high school, my talent for getting lost on runs made me into a good college runner and I ended up being all-conference in cross country twice. After college I kept racing and still “race” today.
For years and even now, people ask me if I will win the race. Back in the day, it was a question about winning overall. Now it is a question about winning my age group. I always give an honest answer, which is usually “no.” Although this seems to bother people, honesty compels me to keep being…honest. While I have won races, I am now 60 years old and my only hopes of victory involve either no one else showing up or divine intervention. While this might seem humble, I struggle with arrogance.
Not long ago, my pride would push me to say that my younger self would have run the race faster than the current winner—when that was true. I am arrogant but not dishonest. But my honesty forced me to confront that looking back on how good I was and comparing that past self to the winner of today’s race is unhealthy and petty. My old times do pop into my head, and I cannot help but make comparisons, but I do try to keep that vice in check. So, I have an odd combination of knowing I am not the best but also being arrogant. But is there an advantage to thinking one is the best or at least better than one is? Was I wrong not to run out when the coach asked for the best player?
On the one hand, I get the point of some degree of self-deception. It could be argued that a person who thinks they are the best will push them towards being the best. Having been racing for decades, I know people like this, and they often push themselves because they believe they are better than they are and are driven to contend against people who are better runners. There can be a downside to this, as those who think they are better than they are sometimes get angry and make excuses for losing to maintain the illusion of their superiority.
On the other hand, this sort of self-deception can be a problem After all, a person who wrongly thinks they are the best will not be acting rationally. In fact, they will probably be suffering from cognitive biases.
One bias is “overconfidence effect.” This bias causes a person to believe they have done better than they have done. As a professor, I often see this bias in students. For example, I have lost track of the times a student has said “my paper felt like an A” when it was a D (or worse) or has said “I think I did great on the test” when it turns out that they did not do great.
A closely related bias is the “better-than-average illusion.” A person falls victim to this when they overestimate their abilities relative to others. As people often think very highly of themselves, they commonly fall into this trap.
While confidence can be a good thing and demoralizing yourself is not going to do you any favors, these biases have negative consequences. One problem is that they can cause people to do worse. After all, a person who overestimates their performance or abilities might not try as hard as they should. They will think they are already doing much better than they are, thus overestimating their performance and coming to a false conclusion about, for example, their grade or skill at running. This is most likely to occur when they do not have immediate feedback, such as on a test or paper. Even when they do get feedback, they will be inclined to think the feedback is mistaken. If someone gets good at rejecting reality, they might have an excellent career in modern American politics.
This bias can also cause a person to “burn out” by trying too hard based on a mistaken assessment of their abilities. For example, inexperienced runners often sprint at the start of a race only to discover that they are not as capable as they had believed. It can even happen to people who should know better. For example, some years ago I went to the USA 15K championship race as part of a team. Before the race, our best runner bragged about running with the Kenyans. While he got off to a good start, some world class female runner passed him. This broke him and he gave up, leaving the race. These women obviously also passed me, but I knew my capabilities and was honest about them, so I just stuck to my plan. I knew what I could do and what I could not do—and I knew I miles left in the race and I would just burn myself out trying to stick with these women. Despite losing one runner, we placed third overall as a team. My experience is that I do better when I have an accurate assessment of my abilities relative to my competition, especially in running. I always try to do my best—but to do this, I must have an accurate gauge of what this is to avoid overconfidence and to resist being defeated by my own pride. While a runner can lie to themselves about how well they should have run and make excuses, one of the many good things about running is that the time you run is an objective fact. This makes it difficult to maintain delusions, and everyone can see how good or bad you are. Unfortunately, this is not true across all of life and incompetent and ignorant grifters can lie their way into positions of power and lie endlessly about their failures being great successes. To be fair and balanced, the incredible success made possible by being good at lying and grifting does tell against my view about honesty. But, perhaps out of spite, I think that the fact that grifting can be seen as a success is condemnation of the system we have collectively built.
It might be objected that my rational assessment of my abilities robs me of the delusional passion that one must have to be a true competitor. This is, however, not the case. As my friends will attest, while I am gracious in defeat I hate to lose. In fact, honesty compels me to say that I hate losing more than I love winning. And I really love to win. As such, when I get to the starting line or play a competitive video game, I am there to win and to make others lose. But victory often rests on knowing what my competitors and I can and cannot do. I gain no advantage by deluding myself into thinking I am better than I am or they are worse than they are. Once again, it might be objected that grifting and lying are very effective in our political and economic system, so being honest is disadvantageous. To be fair and balanced, if we embrace the sophist view that only success matters and define success in terms of getting money and power, then honesty is a losing option. But as we can see the horrific consequences of the griftocracy of lies we live in, it seems evident that honesty remains the best policy.