In one study, people who ranked high on an extroversion scale and people who ranked high on a neuroticism scale both kept diaries about their everyday emotional experiences. Later the extroverts recalled more positive experiences than they had in fact had, and the neurotics recalled more negative experiences than they had in fact had. This is proof that self-inflation, though the norm in our species, isn’t an iron law. But note that both kinds of people were wrong; their particular personalities had steered them toward different kinds of illusions, but in both cases illusion is the operative
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