Eye2theLongRun

In their path breaking paper of Kahneman and Tversky worked with perhaps the two major breakthroughs that set the scene, explicitly, for the cognitive behavioural movement that developed from there on. At last count in that rough but for these purposes reliable enough source Wikipedia I found no fewer than 173 allegedly different but supposedly identifiable cognitive biases, tendencies and distortions. Really? A reasonable argument exists to suggest that by far the majority of these can, given some thought, be collapsed to the original Kahneman and Tversky categories “framing” and “risk aversity”. Their elaboration may or may not be useful depending on purpose which might span a spectrum stretching from pursuit of understanding to the attaining of tenure.

A category which remains at best implicit and is, at the other extreme simply missing I chose to call “Subjective Superiority Dominance”. This term seeks to capture the propensity we seem to have for:

1. Thinking we have the best judgment, the closest to true explanation, that we make the wisest of choices, that our conclusions are the best, and in assessing our own interpretations of the myriad situations and activities which make up life, we see ours in a more favourable light than those of others. In short, our ubiquitous conviction that on most if not all matters we are “right” relative to the alternatives; and what’s more,
2. We are frequently of the view that others ought to adopt our views, preferences (for music, art, books and so on), and favoured explanations. We see our views as correct and right not just for us but for all others since they are “right”. Period. Others we think, would be better off through adopting our views and abandoning the errors of their ways in favour of our superior approach to whatever is in question.

My suggestion here is not so much that this habit, bias or tendency arises from some base motivation, absence of intellect or malfeasance but rather that it exists in readily documented form to (no doubt) greater and lesser extents as a close to universal trait and is thus a factor ever influencing behaviour.

This factor is I believe critical in trying to better understand explanatory schemes.

The notion is explored further elsewhere, and a better description of the phenomenon appears in James Otteson’s “Seven Deadly Economic Sins”, Cambridge University Press, 2021.