Didn’t you do well?

While sports coaching may be increasingly statistics-dependent, people's assessment of performance overrides objective evidence in favour of comparison with others. Oxford University researchers have been looking at how we judge our own performance and that of other people. Their conclusion - we confuse the two, especially if in groups such as sports teams. If the team performs well, people overestimate themselves; if the team performs poorly, they underestimate themselves. The opposite happens in competition, where competing with a strong performer leads people to underestimate their own ability. Marco Wittman, Department of Experimental Psychology - Lead researcher Marco Wittman explained: 'We judge ourselves all the time, from grades at school to how good our skills in playing football are. From a psychological-neuroscientific perspective, we know a lot about the mechanisms behind evaluating objects, but we know much less about the mechanisms that underlie the evaluation of ourselves and others.' To , participants performed simple games in a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scanner and received explicit feedback about how well or badly they themselves and others performed.