You Are Not So Smart: Why You Have Too Many Friends on Facebook, Why Your Memory Is Mostly Fiction, and 46 Other Ways You're Deluding Yourself

by David McRaney

In 1993, Ezra Zuckerman and John Jost at Stanford University asked undergraduates at the University of Chicago to assess their popularity relative to their peers. They took those estimates and compared them with what others reported. They were building on the work of Abraham Tesser, who created self-evaluation maintenance theory in 1988. According to his research, you pay close attention to the successes and failures of friends more than you do to those of strangers. You compare yourself to those who are close to you in order to judge your own worth. In other words, you know Barack Obama and Johnny Depp are successful, but you don’t use them as a standard for your own life to the degree you do colleagues, fellow students, or friends you’ve known since school.