The Lake Wobegon Effect
Should you expect artificially high self-evaluations at work?
At work, it’s hard to escape the next round of self-evaluations about authenticity, belonging, performance, well-being, or whatever institutional issue is rising to the top. Here, we focus on self-ranking of performance and whether or not your organization is like Lake Wobegon where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.”
The Lake Wobegon effect describes the tendency to overestimate one’s achievements. Researchers find the Lake Wobegon effect in students1, teachers2, and CEOs.3 From a business leader’s perspective, understanding the Lake Wobegon effect in young adults is important. It may drive artificially high self-evaluations at work and lower the likelihood that younger workers see opportunities for performance improvement.
As adolescents, Millennials tended to rank themselves very positively compared to their peers.4,5 Did this change with age and experience? Does the Millennial trend continue with Gen Zs? We asked 2,000 young Americans aged 18 to 42 to rank themselves as higher, about the same, or lower than their peers in school or at work in seven categories: drive to achieve, work ethic, leadership ability, intelligence, creativity, effectiveness as an individual contributor, and effectiveness as a teammate. Unless our survey population included only extraordinary achievers, it is statistically impossible for everyone to be above average in any given category.
In other words, the average ranking should be “About the same.” We’ll show histograms for just three of the seven categories— Intelligence (red), Drive to achieve (teal), and Teamwork ability (yellow)—to illustrate that all the distributions for self-rankings are far from normal!
The most popular rating in five of the seven categories was “About the same’ (Table 1). In two categories, Work ethic and Intelligence, this group felt especially good about their abilities. The percentage evaluating themselves as Lower versus Higher also is striking:
7% believe they are less intelligent than their peers and 46% believe they are more intelligent than their peers.
10% believe they have a lower work ethic than their peers and 46% believe their work ethic is better than their peers.
Table 1. Self-rating on seven categories of performance. The aggregate ratings are Lower (6%), About the same (48%), Higher (46%).
Don’t Blame the Millennials
Do Millennials tend to view themselves more positively than GenZ? We didn’t find differences by age, gender, race/ethnicity, level of education, and marital status. We did find people who have more income tend to view themselves more positively in terms of their effectiveness as an individual contributor and in their overall self-rankings.
What’s going on? Perhaps young Americans hold themselves in artificially high regard. Perhaps they are overly critical of others. It’s likely many of them received participation trophies as children and are used to a deep-rooted grade inflation that’s been going on since at least 2010.
How does this trend play out at work? If you ask younger workers to write an end-of-the-year self-evaluation, you should expect two in five to half of them to tell you they perform better than their colleagues. Some (10%) will tell you they are above average on every metric. If you perform evaluations, and think everyone understands that the distributions should approach a normal bell curve, many will meet your feedback about their performance with disbelief. In either case, you’d better have a good definition of the real distinguishing markers of average and above average for the specific cohort you are evaluating and be prepared to share this information.
You also should be prepared to explain that relative performance isn't the same thing as competence and a drive to improve. You might rate yourself lower than average on teamwork, but that does not mean you are an incompetent or bad teammate. It takes some degree of authenticity and self-awareness to even say, “Given the high bar for teamwork in this organization, I might not be above average at that one. How can I improve?” Authenticity and self-reflection absolutely deserve praise. Great performance should be rewarded. It is, however, silly for an organization to tell everyone they are above average. If that’s already the case, why bother with self-improvement?
Lake Wobegon effect research over the years…
1Students → Maxwell, N. L., & Lopus, J. S. (1994). The Lake Wobegon effect in student self-reported data. The American Economic Review, 84(2), 201-205.
2Tucker, P. D. (1997). Lake Wobegon: Where all teachers are competent (or, have we come to terms with the problem of incompetent teachers?). Journal of Personnel Evaluation in Education, 11(2), 103-126.
3CEOS → Hayes, R. M., & Schaefer, S. (2009). CEO pay and the Lake Wobegon effect. Journal of Financial Economics, 94(2), 280-290.
4Twenge, J. M., Konrath, S., Foster, J. D., Campbell, W. K., & Bushman, B. J. (2008). Further evidence of an increase in narcissism among college students. Journal of Personality, 76(4), 919-928.
5 Twenge, J. M., Haidt, J., Blake, A. B., McAllister, C., Lemon, H., & Le Roy, A. (2021). Worldwide increases in adolescent loneliness. Journal of Adolescence, 93, 257-269.
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