In 2017, University of London psychologists Ben Tappin and Ryan McKay asked 270 subjects to evaluate both themselves and the average person as to traits describing morality (honest, trustworthy, fair), agency (hardworking, knowledgeable, competent), and sociability (cooperative, warm, family-orientated).

They found that nearly all the subjects inflated their own desirable moral qualities irrationally. The more desirable a moral trait appeared to the subjects, the more likely they were to ascribe it to themselves.

“The belief that one is morally superior to the average person appears robust and widespread,” they wrote. “We find that moral superiority represents a uniquely strong and prevalent instance of ‘positive illusion.'”

(Ben M. Tappin and Ryan T. McKay, “The Illusion of Moral Superiority,” Social Psychological and Personality Science 8:6 [August 2017], 623-631.)

In his 1908 autobiography, Francis Galton described a “beauty map” he’d compiled of the British Isles:

Whenever I have occasion to classify the persons I meet into three classes, ‘good, medium, and bad,’ I use a needle mounted as a pricker, wherewith to prick holes, unseen, in a piece of paper. … I used this plan for my beauty data, classifying the girls I passed in streets or elsewhere as attractive, indifferent, or repellent. … I found London to rank highest for beauty; Aberdeen lowest.

In 2008, psychologists Viren Swami and Eliana Hernandez set out to compile a beauty map of their own, this time focusing on London. They asked 461 residents to rate the physical attractiveness of men and women in the city’s 33 boroughs. For the record, the City of London, the City of Westminster, and Kensington and Chelsea were rated highest — which correlates with the affluence but not the health (life expectancy) of the residents in those boroughs.

Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel used to walk home together from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. In Incompleteness (2005), Rebecca Goldstein gives a sample of their conversation, broached by Gödel:

All of his thinking is governed by an ‘interesting axiom,’ as Ernst Gabor Straus, Einstein’s assistant from 1944 to 1947, once characterized it. For every fact, there exists an explanation as to why that fact is a fact; why it has to be a fact. This conviction amounts to the assertion that there is no brute contingency in the world, no givens that need not have been given. In other words, the world will never, not even once, speak to us in the way that an exasperated parent will speak to her fractious adolescent: ‘Why? I’ll tell you why. Because I said so!’ The world always has an explanation for itself, or as Einstein’s walking partner puts it, Die Welt is vernunftig, the world is intelligible. The conclusions that emanate from the rigorously consistent application of this ‘interesting axiom’ to every subject that crosses the logician’s mind — from the relationship between the body and the soul to global politics to the very local politics of the Institute for Avanced Study itself — often and radically diverge from the opinions of common sense. Such divergence, however, counts as nothing for him. It is as if one of the unwritten laws of his thought processes is: If reasoning and common sense should diverge, then… so much the worse for common sense! What, in the long run, is common sense, other than common?

Somewhat related: Richard Feynman’s sense of “social irresponsibility.”