第75页 Seeing what we want to see

What is Lake Wobegen effect? What is endowment effect? What is encompassing hypothesis on these two effects?
- Lake Wobegen effect is the natural tendency to overestimate one's capability and see oneself as better than others
- Endowment effect is the hypothesis that people ascribe more values to things merely because they own them
- Both effects result from our tendency to believe what we want to believe
What are two major hypotheses of the mechanism of self-serving beliefs? How does these two mechanisms work together and lead to our self-serving bias?
- motivational process hypothesis: we hold self-serving beliefs because they satisfy important psychological needs or motives, such as motive to maintain self-esteem
- cognitive process hypothesis: we overvalue ourselves because we are more aware of our efforts than others
- Our motivation acts subtly through how we cognitively process information relevant to a belief, i.e. preferences affect the kind of information we consider, the amount of information   we examine, and critera to evaluate propositions
    - we collect information that are slanted towards our preference
    - optional stopping criterion - stop once we find evidence supporting our preferences vs keep digging when evidence contradicts our preference to find more comforting information or uncover why
    - easy standard for beliefs we prefer (only requiring that the evidence not force us to believe otherwise) and difficult standard for beliefs we resist
    - skew meaning we assign to information (i.e. alternative interpretation) to find a frame that is comforting (people who habitually fail to put the most favorable cast on their circustances run the risk of depression)
How to use the theory above to explain Lake Wobegen effect?
- we prefer to believe that we are capable (motive) -> we find criterion that work to our own advantage (e.g. criterion giving more weights to our strength) and evidence that supports this belief come to mind easily (cognitive) -> we conclude that we are above average