Anderson, Warner, and Spencer (1984) demonstrated in a clever study just how prevalent and pervasive inflation bias is in self-assessments of ability. They asked applicants to rate their own abilities in real clerical tasks as well as in bogus tasks that sounded real but were nonsense. Three of the bogus tasks were “operating a matriculation machine,” “typing from audio-fortran report,” and “circumscribing general meeting registers.” The clerical applicants rated themselves high on the real tasks (where their ability was not verified) and also on the tasks that did not even exist!