Excessive Self-Regard Tendency

One of the named psychological tendencies in Charlie Munger’s Charlie Munger — The Psychology of Human Misjudgment talk. Munger’s framing: “We all commonly observe the excessive self regard of man. He mostly misappraises himself on the high side, like the ninety percent of Swedish drivers that judge themselves to be above average.” The over-appraisal extends past the self to one’s “possessions” — a spouse, one’s children, even minor objects, which once owned suddenly seem worth more than one would pay to acquire them (Munger names this last variant the endowment effect). All of a person’s decisions, too, are suddenly regarded as better than they appeared just before they were made.

Munger illustrates the tendency’s darkest form through Leo Tolstoy: “the worst criminals don’t appraise themselves as all that bad,” either denying their crimes or excusing them as understandable given their circumstances. The crucial second half — what Munger calls The Tolstoy Effect — is the man who “makes excuses for his fixable poor performance, instead of providing the fix.” His antidotes are personal (face the fact that fixable-but-unfixed bad performance is “bad character” that breeds more of itself) and institutional (a fair, meritocratic, demanding culture plus severance of the worst offenders). Munger also carves out the constructive side: “self-regard in the form of a justified pride in a job well done, or a life well lived, is a large constructive force” — the bridge Kyle’s Pride and the Priesthood note draws between this secular psychology and the scriptural framing of pride (tagged there alongside Beware of Pride).

Where this appears

• Charlie Munger — The Psychology of Human Misjudgment — the central named tendency: Swedish-drivers self-overrating, the endowment effect, the Tolstoy effect on excuse-making, and the carve-out for “justified pride.”
• Pride and the Priesthood — uses this tendency as the secular-psychology counterpart to the scriptural doctrine of pride, via Munger’s destructive-vs-constructive-pride passage.