Lake Woebegone is a fictional Minnesota town on the radio show A Prairie Home Companion described as “where all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
Lake Woebegone may be fictional but the tendency of people to overestimate their own positive qualities and abilities and to underestimate their negative ones is real. This cognitive bias is called ‘illusory superiority’ in the social psychology literature but is more popularly known as the....