Worse-than-average effect
Also known as: Below-average effect
On hard, rare tasks we rate ourselves below the typical person.
What it means
The mirror image of the better-than-average effect: when a skill is difficult or uncommon, people judge themselves as below average rather than above it. The explanation is again differential weighting — facing a hard task, people focus on their own struggling absolute performance and underattend to the fact that almost everyone else struggles too. Thus the same egocentric, anchoring-on-the-self process produces overconfidence for easy tasks and underconfidence for hard ones. The phenomenon is strong evidence that self-evaluation biases are driven heavily by where attention falls, not merely by a wish to feel good. It complicates simple narratives that people are uniformly self-flattering.
Examples
Most people rate themselves below average at unicycling or at telling whether a wine is expensive — tasks nearly everyone finds hard.
Ask a room of drivers who is above average at driving and most hands go up; ask who is above average at reversing a trailer into a tight space and the hands stay down.
Home cooks call themselves above average at boiling pasta but below average at plating a dessert — they watch their own clumsy attempt and forget that almost everyone's is clumsy.
First described in Kruger (1999); Moore & Small.