<aside> 💡 Most of the content on this page is redacted excerpts from Stumbling on Happiness

</aside>

In a nutshell

We have a fundamentally distorted view of who we are. Our ego distorts facts, manufactures impressions and memories, to perceive ourselves in the most positive light. There are two main sub-mechanisms of it: the illusory-superiority and ego-shield

This dynamic is described at length by Daniel Kahneman, Daniel Gilbert, Julia Galef among others.

Family

My-side bias is in my view a “parent” bias of Confirmation bias, Availability bias, Hindsight bias,Typical mind fallacy, Law of the instrument, Expert trap 🎨, Overconfidence (See more: [My-side bias](https://sysiak.notion.site/2458932426b742be820215b950b9c922))

More notes

Acknowledgement: It’s important for our well-being, psychology, and achieving things in life to partially fall into this bias, to think well of ourself. However, this bias is also one of the strongest cognitive distortions out there and one that causes so much damage in a lot of fields particularly in Epistemology

TLDR of points below

Illusory superiority: The majority of people think they are above the average

96 percent of the cancer patients claimed to be in better health than the average cancer patient

"96 percent of the cancer patients in one study claimed to be in better health than the average cancer patient ... People with life-threatening illnesses such as cancer are particularly likely to compare themselves with those who are in worse shape, which explains why. And if we can’t find people who are doing more poorly than we are, we may go out and create them."

Illusory superiority: Selecting positive, filtering out negative

We select positive and filter out negative information about ourselves.

"In one study, some volunteers were shown evidence indicating that extraverts receive higher salaries and more promotions than introverts do (successful-extravert group) and other volunteers were shown evidence indicating the opposite (successful-introvert group). When the volunteers were asked to recall specific behaviors from their pasts that would help determine whether they were extraverted or introverted, volunteers in the successful-extravert group tended to recall the time when they’d brazenly walked up to a complete stranger and introduced themselves, whereas volunteers in the successful-introvert group tended to recall the time when they saw someone they liked but had been too shy to say hello."

If somebody praises me – I will look for evidence of how competent the source is. If somebody criticizes me – I will look for evidence of how incompetent the source is.

"volunteers in one study were told that they’d scored poorly on an intelligence test and were then given an opportunity to peruse newspaper articles about IQ tests, they spent more time reading articles that questioned the validity of such tests than articles that sanctioned them. When volunteers in another study were given a glowing evaluation by a supervisor, they were more interested in reading background information that praised the supervisor’s competence and acumen than background information that impeached it."

We view things more positively once those things become our own.