Illusion of Asymmetric Insight

The illusion of asymmetric insight is a cognitive bias in which people believe they understand and can predict the people around them, including strangers, better than those people understand or can predict them, while also seeing their own self-knowledge as more complete than others' self-knowledge of themselves. The psychologists Emily Pronin, Justin Kruger, Kenneth Savitsky and Lee Ross documented the effect in a 2001 study, finding that people believed they knew their close friends better than their friends knew them, and that they judged their own spontaneous or off-the-cuff answers as less revealing of their true selves than they judged the same kind of answers from other people. The researchers traced the bias partly to a belief that overt behavior reveals more about other people than it does about oneself, while private thoughts and feelings reveal more about oneself than equivalent behavior does about others.