Have I Got A Story for You

by Lisa Coleman

Here’s some good news: if you’re like most people, you’re way above average—at almost everything. Psychologists call this the state of “illusory superiority.” (It’s also called “The Lake Wobegone Effect,” from Garrison Keillor’s fictional Minnesota town where “all the children are above average.”) It simply means that we tend to inflate our positive qualities and abilities, especially in comparison to other people.

One researcher summarized the data this way: “It’s the great contradiction: the average person believes he is a better person than the average person.” Christian psychologist Mark McMinn contends that the “Lake Wobegone Effect” reveals our pride. He writes, “One of the clearest conclusions of social science research is that we are proud. We think better of ourselves than we really are, we see our faults in faint black and white rather than in vivid color, and we assume the worst in others while assuming the best in ourselves.” “Study: Self-Images Often Erroneously Inflate,” ABC News (11-9-05); Mark McMinn, Why Sin Matters (Tyndale, 2004), pp. 69-71

In a New York Times article titled “The Stories We Tell Ourselves”, philosopher Todd May notes that we’re often telling stories about ourselves-mainly to make ourselves look good. He writes: “we tell stories that make us seem adventurous, or funny, or strong. We tell stories that make our lives seem interesting. And we tell these stories not only to others, but also to ourselves.”

May says that most of us “live in echo chambers that reflect the righteousness of our lives back to us.” And in our “echo chambers” we justify why we and our group are superior to others. In short, we tell ourselves a very narrow, shallow story. CJ Green, “The Only Thing You’ve Got Is What You Can Sell: Making Peace with the Stories of Our Lives,” Mockingbird blog (1-18-17)

A couple of researchers at the University of Toronto and at James Madison University in Virginia proved something that we may already know. We cut ourselves more slack than we give to others. Jonah Lehrer explains why we do this. He claims that we all have “bias blind spots” because there’s a mismatch between how we evaluate others and how we evaluate ourselves.

“When considering the irrational choices of a stranger, for instance, we are forced to rely on [how they behave]: we see their biases from the outside, which allows us to glimpse their [errors]. However, when assessing our own bad choices, we tend to engage in elaborate introspection. We [study] our motivations and search for relevant reasons; we lament our mistakes to therapists and ruminate on the beliefs that led us astray. Adapted from Craig Gross, Open (Thomas Nelson, 2013), pp. 139-141

Paul was writing to Roman readers who would have likely felt superior to their Gentile neighbors believing them to be heathens, pagans, and unbelievers. A good Jew or even a moral Gentile embraced their self-story of a good and moral people and tended to look down through their self-righteous lenses on ‘others’. It created fertile ground for judging others. Paul addresses this erroneous understanding of God’s righteousness by faith and God’s wrath in Romans 2.

Please join us this week for our study of Romans 2:1-16: Righteous Judgment

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You can download the Bible study materials for this session for your personal use and watch the Zoom video of the in-class session by following the links below:

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Follow this link to find other studies in this series: TRANSFORMED: Knowing & Doing God’s Will.