[GuiA]

Students entering MIT are the ones acing every class, being constantly praised by teachers/parents and feeling better than everyone else in high school. Then they enter MIT, where they find themselves with hundreds of fellow students just like them.

For a lot of personalities, this leads to depression and even in some instances suicide.

[Xcelerate]

I would think the fact that they are one of hundreds out of billions would inflate rather than deflate the ego.

[mquander]

That doesn't make sense. People emotionally calibrate themselves against the visible skills of the people in their peer group, not a global distribution of IQ.

[Xcelerate]

Yeah, I know they do that, but it doesn't make sense to me why they do that. If everyone expects to be #1 in the world, everyone but one person is going to be disappointed.

[ajdecon]

It's not a rational thing, but more instinctive. Your immediate surroundings influence you in all sorts of unconscious ways, but all the people in that global distribution are pretty abstract. You can quote statistics all you like, it's difficult for them to change how you "feel" about yourself.

Also http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbars_number

[GuiA]

Go tell that to 18 year olds :)