About 500 years ago, the French writer Montaigne wrote, "I consider myself an average man, except for the fact that I consider myself an average man." I suspect there may be a little false modesty there, considering that Montaigne is credited with inventing the essay as a literary genre, but the main point is that he seems to have sensed something that psychologists have now documented extensively: the average person thinks they're better than average. They think they contribute more to team efforts than the average person, they think they're more morally upstanding than the average person, and so on.
This bias can also operate at the group level. We may think we are more upstanding than another person, or we may think that our sports team is more upstanding or commits fewer penalties. We may think our political party is right and the other one is wrong—that our nation is right and the other is wrong. The bias is the same, whether it's operating at the individual level or the group level.
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