Talk:Lake Wobegon effect

message: In a similar way, a large majority of people claim – impossibly – to be above average;
Actually, almost everyone has an above average number of legs or fingers.  Perhaps what is intended is median or mode?  It seems quite reasonable for most people to believe that they are above average, all it takes is some really bad samples; and having seen a few car drivers doing the most remarkably dumb things this may in fact be the case. ;)  njh 07:08, 19 January 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: Good points there. I noticed a sentence that says that almost everybody thinks that they have some attribute above average (mean or median). :-) Well, I'd certainly hope so, coz it would be awful to suck at everything! ;-) It's in fact easily feasible that there is something where practically everybody really is better than most others. Be it knitting, tying neat knots or sleeping - but I'm pretty sure there is something above average about everyone... --84.250.188.136 (talk) 01:06, 18 June 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  not understanding average 

message: I'm just wondering, I can't imagine that it's a widely used term. But then again, english is not my first language.
I'm just curious.
*It has some currency, though it's not too common and it's usually explained.  Searching the archives, the New York Times has used it in four articles in the last 12 months.  Publications whose readers are less likely to be familiar with American public radio would probably use it less.--Pharos 18:36, 9 June 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I disagree.  Lake Wobegon effect, egocentric bias and actor-observer bias are closely related. Distinguishing (or merging) them may require expert advise. Peace01234 (talk) 03:57, 25 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  how commonly is it used? 

message: From the looks of it, there is absolutely no such thing as the Lake Wobegon effect.
Someone explain this to me.  60% of all HIGH SCHOOLERS, tested by the COLLEGE board(IE, people who are interested in college, or people who are taking AP exams) say that they are in the top 25% of EVERYONE?  What is impossible about that?  Chances are, the people who are taking AP classes in highschool are significantly smarter than those who are not.  Therefore, 60% of people being tested by the college board(in this case, less than one million) could quite easily rate themselves higher than the other(in america) 300,000,000 people who were not tested.  For example.   100% of all people in my AP Calculus class said they were above average in math.  All 30 of those people were infact above average in math.  Liquidtenmillion 00:25, 3 September 2006 (UTC)
thread_title:  I don't understand 

message: "In 1987, John Cannell completed a study that reported the statistically impossible finding that all states claimed average student test scores above the national norm."
The wording seems to implicate that the states were giving actual values. Perhaps ambiguity could be reduced by verifying this, or saying that the states *estimated* above average scores. And of course, if some states estimated, and some gave actual numbers, then not all of the states *claimed* above average test scores, they estimated. I was about to use this example in an assignment, but then I realized how ridiculous it is.
:You imply that the article implies actual values.  It doesn’t.  A claim is a claim.  For example, I am fabulously good-looking.  Is that not a claim I just made?  Did I offer values and hard facts?  — Chameleon 04:30, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Actual values? or an estimation? 

message: I was thinking of an example in which a test was graded from 1 to 10.  Multiple students only received a score of 4, while 1 student only received a score of 1.  Thus, even though all students failed the test, most students are still above average.  I wanted to see how many students had to fail in order to keep the average less than 4.  I started with "(4(100-x)+x)/100<4" and ended with "400<400+3x", which is true for all values of x greater than 0.  I realized that, if students could only receive one of two possible scores, in a binary system or a a pass/fail test (which all high school exit exams that I know of are), every student who passed the test would be above average (assuming that one student failed the test). Banaticus 22:52, 2 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: average of a binary series lies between the two values

message: Example: Five students are asked to rate their looks on a scale of 1 to 10. Four say they rate their looks as a 9 and the last one says their looks rate as a 4. The mean of that series would be 8, making 80% of the students of above 'average' looks.
This mean is taken from the stated self-perception of the participants, rather than from an objective measure which contradicts the self-aggrandizing. Therefore it is irrelevant to this article, and demonstrates nothing relative to the Lake Wobegon effect. It also contradicts the sense of Lake Wobegon, because it is not true that everyone is above average. Furthermore, five people is insufficient for a reasonable normal distribution of attributes. Whoever wrote this probably should have read the article before they added it. --75.63.48.18 (talk) 03:56, 20 January 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: That's not irrelevant to the article.  Most of the examples of the Lake Wobegon effect involve self-assessment of subjective traits.  And the "Lake Wobegon Effect" names the tendency of people to rate themselves or their group as "above average", not everyone.  And finally, five people is a great number to demonstrate the mathematical basis for the argument -- the author was simply demonstrating in an easy to follow example how it's mathematically possible for the majority of a sample to be above average. --68.187.147.210 (talk) 04:30, 28 April 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  I suppose it's interesting, but it's also irrelevant. 

message: "Lake Wobegon Effect" is used in the literature (e.g. Rudiger Pohl (Ed.) 2004. Cognitive Illusions Psychology Press) as a synonym for what is also called Illusory Superiority. The article at present has some material about this, but much more about means and medians, which doesn't have much to do with the psychological experiments. The psychologists are well aware of the difference between median and mean and other mentioned problems. There are already WP articles on the Overconfidence effect and Dunning-Kruger effect where there is a heavy overlap with this article.
"Lake Wobegon Effect" does seem to be used in the literature, but it's a more culture-bound term than "Illusory Superiority", "Better-than-average effect" or "Superiority Bias", which are less opaque. I'll do some further work on this on Tuesday 27 May.MartinPoulter (talk) 14:16, 24 May 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Agreed, this is a mess.  It would be better to get all the psychology material into a separate article and just have a link to it from here - "Lake Wobegon Effect" is almost never used in the academic literature on these effects (only 8 references in Web of Knowledge compared with far more talking about "better than average effect" or "above average effect" - though those are quite tricky to sift out from the mass of articles where those words are used without technical intent.  The trouble is that the psychology literature is also a bit of a mess, with a number of different names for what may or may not be a single phenomenon - partly because cognitive and social psychologists have both come on the same issues but from different directions.  This isn't an easy fix.  seglea (talk) 22:44, 18 August 2008 (UTC)
replies: text: Yes, agreed. Illusory superiority article now exists, by the way. Perhaps psychological material could go there? MartinPoulter (talk) 14:47, 19 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  This article needs drastic surgery