Brenda Major, a social psychologist at the University of California in Santa Barbara, started studying the problem of self-perception decades ago. “In my earliest days as a young professor, I was doing a lot of work on gender, and I would set up a test where I’d ask men and women how they thought they were going to do on a variety of tasks or tests.” She found that the men consistently overestimated their abilities and subsequent performance, and that the women routinely underestimated both. The actual performances did not differ in quality.
