In his book House of Cards , Robyn Dawes reported that most students believed they would be less likely than the average person to become sick. Not surprisingly then, a recent classroom exercise at Brown University showed that all students expected to do better than most of their classmates on the midterm exam. Another method of self-enhancement is to overestimate the desirability of one's own traits. People who concede to be selfish, for example, consider selfishness to be less undesirable than people who claim not to be selfish. Again, this bias does not depend on the social desirability of the trait.
Kind people consider kindness to be more desirable than unkind people do.
High self-esteemers and narcissists are most likely to overestimate their own accomplishments and overvalue their own traits. These findings question a uniformly positive interpretation of self-esteem. Understandably, the quest for high self-esteem will remain a priority for many of those who do not have it. For better of for worse, however, this goal is already realized for most people. This is not surprising in a culture in which the happy fool is close to becoming the paragon of mental health.