The crux of this technique is that people think about themselves in very different ways than they think about other people. They tend to scrutinize themselves at an incredibly close level of detail, much more closely than they examine the actions or appearance of others.
This is kind of worrying, because so much of our public policy is based on the idea that people can imagine what it’s like to walk in someone else’s shoes. And that myth is so widespread that people are very confident about their ability to do so. “The problem we find over and over again in our data on these social cognition studies, the problem isn’t incompetence, it’s not that people are idiots, it’s that they’re overconfident. The problem is hubris,” Epley says.
Leadingchurch.com 