mxx1's avatar

5%

Lifted straight out of an academic paper in Psychology of Men & Masculinity by the American Psychological Association
(2006, Vol. 7, No. 3, 129–143);

“Only 55% of men were satisfied with their penis size, 45% wanted to be larger, and 0.2% wanted to be smaller.”

My thoughts went straight to the Gaussian curve. Who are these deluded 5 percenters that were unrealistically satisfied?

But is it a guassian? You see, these bloody academics miss the good stuff. Imagine if the distribution for penis size was skewed to the right. Why?

Ah, simple explanation grasshopper … participants in the study were asked to estimate their own penis size.

So there’d be a bias in guessing large and therefore satisfaction with what they’ve got.

Self-estimation introduces two distortions:

1. Cognitive bias (notably, self-enhancement bias)

2. Social desirability bias (particularly around masculinity)

(there’s a bias for everything. Probably a fairy floss bias if you look hard enough)

This isn’t a study of genitalia. It’s a study of delusion, of how men lie to themselves and then believe it.

And here’s the gift; we’re handed a number, 5%. That’s your margin of fantasy; the proportion of men apparently overjoyed with their imagined endowment.

But hang on. If you’re in the top quartile, you know. If you’re in the bottom quartile, you also know, and can’t convincingly fake it. So the ability to delude yourself depends on being close enough to average that reality stays ambiguous.

Take home message no. 1; the capacity for self-delusion peaks in the middle of the bell curve.

Take home message no. 2; I’d estimate: 5% of the middle 10%, i.e. half the population if extrapolated to other matters, are capable of deep, sustained delusion about things that matter to them. That matches with my empirical observations.

Dunning-Kruger meets locker room insecurity. Ignoble Prize cumming up!

On the flip side, did you notice that only 0.2% of humans are willing to admit that there’s too much of a good thing? Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that those 0.2% are in the top 50%.

To summarise, 4 in a thousand humans are genuinely honest with themselves, and half just lie.

Yeah, we’re fucked.