Who's the Deluded One?

This isn't an economics study, but so fascinating I feel compelled to call it out. A friend pointed me to research conducted by Dutch psychologists on the self perception of woman suffering from anorexia nervosa.

The researchers asked one group of anorexic women and another group of women without the disorder (but with similar skinny bodies) to rate their own attractiveness.

Then two groups of evaluators consisting of both men and women were asked to rate the women's appearances after being shown a set of photos of their bodies. The photos did not show the women's faces but showed them in their underwear.

The ratings the anorexic women gave themselves matched up almost perfectly with the evaluators' judgments.

But on the other hand, the evaluators rated the 'normal' women much lower than the women had rated themselves. (The evaluators, however, rated the 'normal' group as being more attractive than the anorexic group.)

The surprising conclusion: it's not that anorexics have a deluded perception of their appearance, in fact their self appraisal is actually pretty darn accurate. It's the rest of us who may be fooling ourselves, the researchers speculate.

(Of course, not everybody agrees with this interpretation.)

The study adds to the growing field of research into what psychologists call depressive realism, the idea that depressed people have a more accurate perception of reality than 'normal' people.

The researchers don't have the answer as to whether depression turns people into anorexics or whether it's the eating disorder that summons the black dog.

Still, the existence of the need for humans to believe things are better than they actually are makes perfect sense. Would we really be able to function or live with people if we knew what they really thought of us?

And what are the implications here for economic models? What does it mean when the people dubbed 'abnormal' are the one acting rationally?

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