On average..

"Announcing that on average, people have an average intelligence is kind of boring. What's interesting about intelligence and what is interesting about things like personality is the variation around the mean and the explanation about that variation. And that's what we need to start talking about now.

Oh, btw. well, it is, of course, by definition the case, that on average, people have average intelligence, they don't believe it. If you ask people "Do you think that you are more intelligent, less intelligent or about of average intelligence compared to the rest of the population, you'll get some distribution around that, too. But you'll find that the average perception of intelligence is that we're all above average.

This goes for a variety of other questions like "How good looking are you? Above average, below average or average?". Well, we're all little above average there, too. It turns out, that there is one group that gets the answer correct. And if you ask this group of people on average "Are you brighter or dumber than average, they'll come out in the middle. Asked "Are you cuter or uglier than average?", they'll come out, you know, average. Anybody knows who that group is? ….. Yes, it's the depressed. Depressed people have an accurate assessment of their own intelligence and good looks. In fact, it has been seriously argued, that part of what keeps us undepressed is an unrealistic assessment of the world. Right? We're smart, we're good looking … if we knew the truth, we all will be depressed. But that's a topic for another date. …."

Extracted from the Jeremy Wolfe's lecture "Intelligence: How do we know you are smart?"