A 1961 research project asked ordinary people to send extremely painful electric shocks to a stranger. (Unbeknownst to the participants, the fake shocks were only delivered to an actor.) A staggering 65% of the subjects obeyed. Most of us are confident we would have been in the 35% who refused to go along with this program. But in her essay for The Washington Post, "You're Not as Virtuous as You Think," Nitin Nohria has a name for this "gap between how people believe they would behave and how they actually behave"—"moral overconfidence."

She writes: In the lab, in the classroom and beyond, we tend to be less virtuous than we think we are. And a little moral humility could benefit us all. Moral overconfidence is on display in politics, in business, in sports—really, in all aspects of life … There are political candidates who say they won't use attack ads until, late in the race, their moral overconfidence is in line with what studies find to be our generally inflated view of ourselves. We rate ourselves as above-average drivers, investors, and employees, even though math dictates that can't be true for all of us. We also tend to believe we are less likely than the typical person to exhibit negative qualities and to experience negative life events: to get divorced, become depressed, or have a heart attack.

Source:

Nitin Nohria, “You’re not as virtuous as you think,” The Washington Post (10-15-15)