Lake Wobegon effect
Lake Wobegon effect noun: illusory superiority, that is, the belief that a majority of people are or can be above average.
Noun
Lake Wobegon effect (plural Lake Wobegon effects)
- Illusory superiority, that is, the belief that a majority of people are or can be above average.
- “It’s the Lake Wobegon effect,” said Dr. Daniel P. Sulmasy, senior author and a professor of medicine and ethics at the University of Chicago. “If you have more than 50 percent of patients saying their chances are better than average of avoiding some harm or obtaining some benefit, they are being...2011 March 3, Pauline W. Chen, quoting Daniel P. Sulmasy, “When Optimism Is Unrealistic”, in The New York Times, →ISSN, archived from the original on 10 Jun 2021
Forms of Lake Wobegon effect
| plural | Lake Wobegon effects |
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Origin of Lake Wobegon effect
From the fictional place Lake Wobegon in Garrison Keillor's A Prairie Home Companion, where all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average.
Questions about Lake Wobegon effect
- What does Lake Wobegon effect mean?
- Lake Wobegon effect means illusory superiority, that is, the belief that a majority of people are or can be above average.
- What part of speech is Lake Wobegon effect?
- Lake Wobegon effect is a noun.
- What is the plural of Lake Wobegon effect?
- The plural of Lake Wobegon effect is Lake Wobegon effects.
Words near Lake Wobegon effect in the dictionary
Source and license
Adapted from Wiktionary: Lake Wobegon effect (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.
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Cite this entry: “Lake Wobegon effect.” Word.ws, https://word.ws/lake_wobegon_effect. Based on Wiktionary, CC BY-SA 4.0.