The hidden cost of thinking you're better than others

Quick answer: Believing you're better than others, or simply assuming you already know what someone is capable of, quietly costs leaders talent, ideas and growth. Research shows we tend to read social status as ability, hiring decisions still skew by a person's name, and the more powerful we feel, the less advice we take. The fix isn't false modesty. It's curiosity, fairer processes, and staying open to learning from anyone in the room.

During COVID, parent-teacher meetings were conducted remotely. My wife had spoken with our son's teacher over the phone. When they eventually met in person, the teacher said something neither of us has forgotten.

“You're not what I was expecting. I thought you'd be blonde-haired and blue-eyed. Your English was just exceptional.”

My wife is Korean. I'm Malaysian Chinese. Our son, whom the teacher already knew, is unmistakably Asian.

I still find that extraordinary.

Somewhere between hearing my wife's voice and forming a picture of her, the teacher had made an assumption. Someone who spoke English that well must surely be white.

Perhaps she thought she was paying a compliment. I don't know what she intended, and I don't think I need to.

What interests me is the expectation behind the surprise.

It turns out researchers have studied something very close to it. In a well-known 1992 study, American university students listened to the same recorded lecture, given by a native English speaker. Some saw a photo of a white woman as the lecturer. Others saw a photo of an Asian woman. Same voice. Same words.

The students who saw the Asian face reported hearing an accent that wasn't there, and understood less of the lecture.

The teacher's surprise was the mirror image. She heard excellent English and pictured a white face. In both cases, the expectation of who speaks “good English” came from appearance, not from the voice itself.

It got me thinking about the assumptions we all carry. About intelligence, education, wealth, ethnicity, where people live and what they're capable of.

And something deeper. Why do we sometimes need to see ourselves as better than others?

More importantly, what might that be costing us?

Is confidence the same as superiority?

No. And the difference matters.

Confidence helps us take risks, pursue opportunities and persevere through setbacks. Competition can bring out the best in us.

There's nothing wrong with recognising that we're better at certain things than other people. An experienced surgeon is better at surgery than I am. Someone who has spent decades mastering a craft has earned expertise that deserves respect.

But there's a difference between being better at something and believing you're better than someone.

Confidence says, “I know what I'm good at.”

Superiority says, “I'm better than you.”

Confidence can recognise another person's strengths without feeling diminished. Superiority needs someone else to be beneath us.

A person who believes they're superior may look confident and accomplished. They may even achieve extraordinary things. But if their sense of worth depends on comparison, they may be building an invisible ceiling on their own growth.

After all, why would you learn from someone you've already decided is beneath you?

Why do we mistake someone's status for their ability?

We all make quick judgements about people. Where they live. Where they went to school. What they do for a living. How they dress. How they speak.

Someone mentions they live in a less affluent suburb, and we're surprised by how articulate they are.

Someone has an impressive job title, and we assume their opinion carries more weight.

Someone works on the frontline, and we assume they couldn't possibly see the bigger strategic picture.

These assumptions aren't always hostile. Sometimes they sound like compliments.

“You're so well spoken.”

“You're much smarter than I expected.”

But what exactly were we expecting?

Psychologist Susan Fiske and her colleagues developed the Stereotype Content Model. Their research found that people judge groups along two dimensions, warmth and competence, and that how high a group's status is seen to be is very closely tied to how competent people assume its members are. The pattern has since been found across many countries.

In other words, we tend to read someone's position in society as evidence of their ability.

And we don't need to dislike someone to underestimate them. We can think they're lovely, hardworking and deserving, while quietly assuming they aren't particularly capable.

That's why “positive” stereotypes are just as revealing.

“Asians are good at maths.”

“Women are naturally caring.”

Each one reduces a person to a group expectation. And when someone doesn't fit, we're surprised.

The teacher's comment doesn't mean she believed herself superior to my wife. Stereotyping and superiority aren't the same thing. But both grow from the invisible hierarchies we use to make sense of the world, and both stop us seeing people as they really are.

What does this cost an organisation?

Talent. Often without anyone noticing.

In Australia, economists sent more than 4,000 job applications for entry-level roles, with identical Australian schooling and experience, changing only the applicant's name. Applicants with Chinese names received interview callbacks 21% of the time, compared with 35% for Anglo-Saxon names. To get the same number of interviews, a Chinese-named applicant had to send 68% more applications.

That was 2007. A 2023 Australian study of more than 12,000 applications, all from Australian-born and Australian-educated applicants, found the gap had not gone away. For leadership roles, applicants with English names received a positive response 26.8% of the time. Applicants with non-English names: 11.3%. That's 57% fewer responses for the very roles where organisations say they want diverse leadership.

The pattern isn't unique to Australia. In a famous US study, Marianne Bertrand and Sendhil Mullainathan sent fictitious résumés to employers in Boston and Chicago, randomly assigning names that sounded white or African American. White-sounding names received about 50% more callbacks (9.65% versus 6.45%).

Two details make it worse.

Improving the résumé lifted callbacks for white-sounding names by nearly 30%, but barely moved them for Black-sounding names. And a “better” address helped everyone, but didn't close the gap.

Think about what that means for an employer. The strongest candidates in one group were being passed over most. The organisation wasn't just being unfair. It was losing its best people before it ever met them.

Fixing the process helps, but it takes care. Blind orchestra auditions, introduced across major US orchestras in the 1970s and 1980s, are often cited as proof. The original research suggested screens helped women advance in some rounds, but the estimates were imprecise, and later re-analyses argue the evidence is weaker than its fame suggests. Closer to home, a 2017 Australian Public Service trial found that removing names from CVs actually reduced the shortlisting of women, because managers were already favouring diversity.

The lesson isn't “blind everything.” It's that our judgement is less objective than we think, so the process deserves as much attention as the people in it.

Can our expectations shape how people perform?

Yes, and that's the part I find most troubling.

In their 1968 book Pygmalion in the Classroom, Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson suggested that students teachers expected to flourish went on to do better. The original study has been heavily criticised. Later reviews found that teacher-expectation effects are real but usually modest, and strongest for students who are already disadvantaged.

At work, the mechanism is easier to see.

A manager decides one employee has leadership potential and another doesn't. The first gets stretch assignments, mentoring and exposure to senior leaders. The second gets routine work.

A year later, the first has grown and the second hasn't. The manager concludes they were right all along.

But were they?

Research backs up how this happens. One study found that managers with “protective” attitudes towards women, the kind that sound kind, gave women fewer challenging assignments, even though the women were just as interested in them. Another found that managers who believe people's ability is fixed are anchored by first impressions, and simply fail to notice when an employee improves.

That's a self-fulfilling prophecy. And it's dangerous because it looks like good judgement.

We think we're observing someone's limits, when we may be observing the opportunities we denied them.

How many capable people never find out what they can do, because someone else decided for them?

What happens when a leader needs to be the smartest person in the room?

Intelligence, experience and past success don't automatically make someone a better leader. Sometimes they get in the way.

Imagine two CEOs. Both are smart, experienced and ambitious.

The first believes their judgement is generally better than everyone else's. They've built something real and overcome hard things. But they dismiss ideas that don't fit their thinking, give more weight to people they consider important, and get impatient when challenged.

The second is just as capable. But they're curious. They value their experience without assuming it's complete. They seek out different perspectives, welcome challenge and change their mind when the evidence is better.

Which one builds an organisation that can grow beyond their own capacity?

I'd put my money on the second. Not because they're nicer. Because they use the collective intelligence of the people around them. It's the difference between leading people and managing them.

The research is fairly clear here:

• Power reduces listening. People who feel more powerful become more confident, take less advice, and make less accurate decisions as a result.
• Leaders who dominate the conversation lower team performance. When a powerful leader does most of the talking, the team communicates less, and results suffer.
• Silence is the default. Employees follow unwritten rules, like “don't embarrass the boss in public”, that keep them quiet even when their manager is supportive.
• Psychological safety enables learning. In a 1999 study of 51 teams in a manufacturing company, Amy Edmondson found that teams with higher psychological safety engaged in more learning behaviour (asking questions, seeking feedback, discussing mistakes), and this helped explain their performance.

None of this means everyone gets a vote, or that standards drop. It means accepting that the person with the most authority doesn't always have the best information.

Sometimes the frontline employee knows something the executive team doesn't. Sometimes the newest recruit sees the problem everyone else has learned to live with.

But none of that matters if the leader has already decided whose opinions are worth hearing.

A CEO who needs to be the smartest person in the room may end up surrounded by people who have stopped trying.

Why do we need to feel better than others?

Because status matters to us more than we like to admit.

Psychologists have argued that the desire for status is a fundamental human motive, and that people react strongly when their status is threatened. Will Storr's The Status Game explores how we chase it: through dominance, through being seen as good, and through being seen as successful.

Most of us also quietly rate ourselves as better than average. A review of studies involving more than 950,000 people found this tendency is robust and widespread.

Society gives us plenty of scoreboards. The better suburb. The more prestigious school. The bigger title.

But there's a catch. There's always someone with more.

Research on self-worth shows that when our sense of worth depends on proving ourselves, we respond to threats in ways that undermine learning. We stop trying to improve and start trying to prove.

So we dismiss people who challenge us. Avoid rooms where we're not the expert. Surround ourselves with people who agree.

The very thing that makes us feel successful can stop us becoming more successful.

Adam Grant's Think Again describes the antidote as confident humility: secure enough in yourself to admit what you don't know.

Do you have to be a bad person to make a bad judgement?

No. And that's what makes this hard.

Some people consciously look down on others. That's recognisable arrogance.

But there's a far more common version. We simply don't look closely enough. We make assumptions from limited information, sort people into categories, and never examine the expectations behind them.

Jennifer Eberhardt's Biased shows how learned associations can shape what we notice and how we interpret it, even in people who sincerely reject prejudice. The strongest evidence comes from experiments, not from tests that try to score an individual's “hidden bias”, which predict behaviour only weakly.

You don't have to be a bad person to make a bad judgement. You don't have to dislike someone to underestimate them.

The question isn't whether we have biases. It's whether we're curious enough to question them.

What does this mean for leaders who want to scale?

Scaling requires something many founders find hard. You have to stop being the source of every answer.

You need people who think independently, make decisions and challenge you. You need to recognise capabilities you don't have yourself.

That takes confidence, and humility. Not downplaying what you've achieved, but recognising that however much you know, there's always something you don't.

The evidence on humble leadership has grown. Large reviews covering hundreds of studies link it with greater trust, engagement, creativity and willingness to speak up, and with better team performance. It hasn't yet been shown to lift organisation-wide financial results directly, and most of the research is correlational. But it supports exactly the behaviours a growing organisation depends on.

In my work with purpose-driven CEOs, I use a simple rule from my parenting training: connect before we correct. It applies here too. Get curious about the person before you decide what they're capable of.

Five uncomfortable questions for your leadership team:

1. Who in our organisation might be more capable than their current role suggests?
2. Whose opinions do we give more weight to because of their title, background or status?
3. When did someone we underestimated last prove us wrong?
4. Are we developing talent based on demonstrated capability, or on what we think a successful person looks and sounds like?
5. What opportunities are we missing because we believe we already know the answers?

These aren't only questions about fairness. They're questions about performance.

Every overlooked employee is potential not yet developed. Every dismissed idea might be an opportunity lost.

What is real success?

I keep coming back to that conversation with our son's teacher.

I doubt she meant to cause offence. But her surprise revealed an expectation about what an articulate English speaker should look like.

How often do we all do something similar?

How often do we mistake someone's social position for their ability? Confuse confidence with competence? Assume that because we've achieved more in one area, we have more to offer in every area?

Perhaps real success isn't about proving we're better than others.

Perhaps it's about becoming better ourselves, while recognising and developing the potential in the people around us.

For a purpose-driven leader, that might mean an organisation where people flourish, the community you serve benefits, the numbers are sustainable, and you can eventually step back without everything collapsing.

That asks us to move from judgement to curiosity. From status to contribution. From certainty to learning.

Because the moment we decide we're better than someone, we lose the curiosity to discover what they know that we don't.

Sometimes the greatest obstacle to our success isn't what we don't know. It's what we're so certain we already do.

In short

• Confidence is about what you're good at. Superiority needs someone beneath you.
• We read status as ability. We underestimate people we like as well as people we don't.
• It costs talent. In Australia, applicants with non-English names receive far fewer callbacks, especially for leadership roles.
• Expectations become results. Who gets stretch assignments shapes who grows.
• Power reduces listening. The more certain the leader, the quieter the team.
• Humble, curious leadership is linked with trust, engagement, speaking up and stronger teams.

Benn Lim is a Scaling Up coach based in Wollongong, working with CEOs of purpose-driven organisations across Australia to find the cash, bring their team with them and stop running on empty.

Sources

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