Come on. Be honest — how well do you get along with others? When asked to compare your amiability to your peers, are you above, below or at average?

In 1977, the College Board asked 829,000 high school students to assess their friendliness, and found that 89 percent of respondents believed they possess better than average personal skills.

Twenty-five percent of survey respondents placed themselves in the top one percent for social skills. A statistically negligible number of students, zero percent of those surveyed considered themselves below average.

And yet this statistical impossibility of average — an emblematic one that has been representative of the “better than average” effect for psychologists — is more than an indication of self-aggrandizement. Self-deception affects everything from relationships to job assessment and ethical reasoning, researchers in psychology and philosophy have found.

SUBCONSCIOUSLY CHEATING

Mike Norton, a former researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Media Lab, found when given the opportunity to cheat on an IQ test, students did cheat, but then failed to recognize their cheating and attributed enhanced test scores to their own unaided intelligence.

Norton, now a professor at the Harvard Business School, has been presenting his findings on self-deception at conferences and is currently working to present his research in a formal paper. Norton said while self-deception as a wide-spread trend has been studied before, little research has been done about individuals caught in the moment of deception.

Norton was working at the Media Lab in 2003 when a common practice caught his attention.

“We were thinking, when kids are studying for the SATs — they kind of peek at the next questions,” he said.

Norton wondered if those students who flipped between questions and answers in exam practice books inadvertently cheated on questions they hadn’t answered yet — and if their cheating-enhanced performance resulted in an inflated sense of their ability to take the test.

Working with Dan Ariely, a professor of behavioral economics at the Sloan School of Business at MIT, Norton administered IQ test questions to almost 600 undergraduate students at MIT and Harvard. Two test groups were given the same questions. One group’s set of questions had the answers at the bottom of the page.

“People definitely did better when they had the answers,” Norton said.

The two groups were then asked to predict their scores on a second test — given to both groups without answers. The group that had taken the first test with answers available predicted higher scores than they received on the second test. The group also reported the first test was easier.

The enhanced performance on the first test resulted in a positive re-evaluation of abilities. Norton compares the cheating to falling down the stairs. To update the situation negatively would result in the self-assessment, “I am clumsy.” To not update the situation would result in the self-assessment, “I rarely fall down the stairs.” To positively update the situation brings about the self-deceptive, “Everyone is laughing — I am funny.”

To acknowledge cheating on a test may result in the negative update, “I needed to cheat — I am less intelligent;” the non-updated outlook would be, “I rarely cheat — I am equally intelligent.” Most often, however, Norton found that test-takers positively updated: “I performed well — I am more intelligent.”

Norton said this led him to believe that while people recognize their ability to deceive, when in the moment, they “rationalize that behavior away” and are unaware of the process.

“They think their IQ is now higher,” he said of the group who took their tests with answers included.

MIT students were interested in participating in the study Norton conducted.

“We started out paying them. Then we realized they were perfectly happy to take the test for free,” he said.

Norton said self-deception is a difficult subject to study because of its personal, internal nature.

“There’s not a ton of research because people can’t figure out how to study it,” he said. “It’s really hard. What questions do you ask?”

PHILOSOPHY OF THE MIND

Alfred Mele, a philosophy professor at Florida State University, has been studying self-deception for 25 years. Philosophers work from the empirical data derived from psychological research, he said.

Mele became involved in a branch of his discipline closely tied to psychology, philosophy of the mind, after being asked to comment on a philosopher’s paper in the early 1980s.

As he learned about the then dominant theories of self-deception, he began to formulate his own ideas.

“I found it all very interesting,” he said of then dominant theories of self-deception. “But I had a sketch of my own theories.”

Mele said the predominant theory then held that self-deception worked much like two-person deception, in which one person knows the truth and one person is deceived. A paradox was required for that explanation.

“You have the same person knowing the truth and getting himself to believe the opposite,” Mele said. While Freudian models and other theories involving the subconscious explained this model, Mele questioned it.

“How the heck does that happen? How do you end up believing something false?” he said.

Mele said he subscribes to the theory of lay hypothesis testing, in which individuals prove or disprove hypotheses based upon what outcome will be least costly for them to believe.

Mele points to examples of straight deception, as when parents will deceive themselves about the possibility their child using drugs, despite substantial positive evidence that would confirm the hypothesis for a disinterested party.

Mele has also theorized about twisted self-deception in his book, Self-Deception, and in recent articles.

Twisted self-deception occurs when individuals who believe something is true, even though the belief lacks evidence, actually want the opposite. The classic example, Mele said, is the jealous romantic partner. The “Othello effect” occurs primarily among persons with personality disorders — like unusual jealous tendencies.

Mele said self-deception is normal and even healthy among most people. Depressive-realism is a phenomenon observed in self-assessment.

“The people who are most accurate about themselves are depressed people,” Mele said.

“Over self-estimation is fine when there is no significant cost; it’s not fine when there is,” Mele added. He said aging airline pilots and surgeons who do not recognize their faltering skills are dangerous, but “believing that you’re more likeable is not dangerous.”

Boston University psychology professor Richard Ely said the “better than average” effect is observed more readily in Western culture than elsewhere.

“Putting a positive spin on yourself works,” he said.

Ely said self-deception research contradicts the “folk theory of mental health,” that people with the most accurate self-knowledge are the healthiest. Ely affirms Mele’s statement and said studies have proven “moderately depressed individuals are most accurate in their self-assessment.”

Although self-deception does not play a large role in his area of expertise, child psychology, Ely does introduce self-deception and the better than average effect to his psychology methods class.

“You would think college students would have a pretty good idea of how smart they are . . . . You think people have a pretty good appreciation of where they fall in terms of looks,” Ely said of a study he uses to illustrate the phenomenon. “And that is not the case.”

Ely said he thinks self-deception is not unusually difficult to study when specific variables are isolated and objectively analyzed.

“You just have to be clear about the domains of self-deception,” he said.

UNSKILLED AND UNAWARE

Justin Kruger, a marketing professor at the Stern School of Business at New York University, said his education in psychology complements his career.

“Both fields are aimed at better understanding human behavior, so study in one definitely helps with study in the other,” he said in an email. “Deception, including self-deception, is [unfortunately] common in marketing — although it’s uncommon [and unnecessary] in ethical marketing.”

Kruger, working with Cornell psychologist Dan Dunning, released the study “Unskilled and Unaware of It” in 1999. The study found that not only do people over-estimate their abilities, but those who are least competent do so to the greatest degree.

In their study, Kruger and Dunning tested humor, logical reasoning and English grammar abilities. To test humor, participants in the study were asked to rate jokes on a questionnaire that had already been assessed by professional comedians. The results of the test were then compared with a self-assessment of each person’s sense of humor.

The study found “those who performed particularly poorly relative to their peers were utterly unaware of this fact.” In the humor test, those participants who scored in the bottom 25 percent “not only overestimated their percentile ranking, but they overestimated it by 46 percentile points.”

Kruger and Dunning suggest this is because those who are not adept at something are not able to recognize their errors. “The skills that enable one to construct a grammatical sentence are the same skills necessary to recognize a grammatical sentence, and thus are the same skills necessary to determine if a grammatical mistake has been made,” the study reads.

Kruger said over-confidence may be dangerous or benign.

“Some research suggests that overconfidence is detrimental; other research suggests that a little overconfidence is probably healthy,” he said. ”The answer, I think, is somewhere in between.”

Kruger said self-deception studies involve self-analysis for the researcher.

“One of the biggest challenges of the kind of research I do is the inevitable realization that I’m probably not as smart as I thought I was,” he said.