Some people seem to be overconfident about their performence and ability even when the whole world might have a very different opinion.In his novel, Lake Wobegon Days, Garrison Keillor describes a small town in rural US where "all the women are strong, all the men are good looking, and all the children are above average" (Keillor, 1985). Such a characterization demonstrates par excellence the pervasive human tendency to overestimate one’s performance, ability and achievements in relation to others. The Lake Wobegon Effect as it has been referred to, causes people to think that they are ‘above average’ in many domains in life and has been observed in different situations such as academic performance, intelligence, social skills, and skill specific capabilities (Hoorens, 1993).
Kruger and Dunning (1999), devised experiments in which participants were given specific tasks (such as judging humorous jokes as funny or not, grammar tasks and logic problems) and were asked to evaluate their perceived performance on these tasks relative to the rest of the group they had been put in. Actual and perceived performance were compared and it was found that in all groups participants evaluated their performance as above average. Even those whose actual performance was at the lowest levels tended to grossly overestimate their ability. In the Nobel (2000) winning paper “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments” (Kruger & Dunning, 1999), which was presented by myself and others colleagues in class today, the authors attribute the illusory superiority effects to lack of task specific knowledge. That is, a remarkable link seems to exist between overconfidence and incompetence: people with little knowledge about something tend not to recognise their own lack of knowledge and fail to see expertise in others. Indeed, as the research mentioned above indicated, not only do incompetent individuals fail to recognise expertise and competence and overestimate their ability but are also oblivious to social comparison information, i.e. they can’t use other people’s better/worse performance as information to evaluate their own performance. Intuitively, this argument seems very plausible. If one lacks the knowledge about a specific task/domain/situation how can one spot out his/her own mistakes? For instance, when I took a module in French, while studying for my BSc, I had to write short letters to demonstrate my knowledge of basic French, as part of the assessment. In those letters, that now seem very amusing, I was oblivious to all basic rules or French grammar and syntax, writing sentences that would be the equivalent of “Me go university very nice”. While writing such sentences I thought they were actually correct (until the results were given out). As the knowledge needed to write good French is the same knowledge needed to spot out mistakes in these writings, and as I lacked such knowledge at that stage, I thought I wrote correctly. Therefore, being overconfident about my ability to write good French was a result of my lack of grammatical and syntactic knowledge.
The fact that we favorably compare ourselves to others, as demonstrated by research, makes me think whether appart from knowledge levels, individual differences are into play in illusory superiority effects as well. Do people that score higher in self esteem overestimate their performance and rate themselves above others (as a result of their higher optimism and self esteem) or do those with lower self esteem belittle others (and as a result, seemingly overestimate themselves) in order to strengthen their fragile self concept, as perhaps a psychotherapist would assert?
Nonetheless, regardless of my own levels of self esteem (that oscillate between inexistence and oblivion) I wonder how much I actually knew about a particular domain, when I judged myself to be ‘better than average’ in it. Hmm…
Hoorens, Vera (1993). Self-enhancement and Superiority Biases in Social Comparison. European Review of Social Psychology, 4, (1): 113–139.
Keillor, G. (1985). Lake Wobegon Days. New York: Viking.
Kruger, Justin; David Dunning (1999). "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, (6): 1121–34.
Kruger and Dunning (1999), devised experiments in which participants were given specific tasks (such as judging humorous jokes as funny or not, grammar tasks and logic problems) and were asked to evaluate their perceived performance on these tasks relative to the rest of the group they had been put in. Actual and perceived performance were compared and it was found that in all groups participants evaluated their performance as above average. Even those whose actual performance was at the lowest levels tended to grossly overestimate their ability. In the Nobel (2000) winning paper “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments” (Kruger & Dunning, 1999), which was presented by myself and others colleagues in class today, the authors attribute the illusory superiority effects to lack of task specific knowledge. That is, a remarkable link seems to exist between overconfidence and incompetence: people with little knowledge about something tend not to recognise their own lack of knowledge and fail to see expertise in others. Indeed, as the research mentioned above indicated, not only do incompetent individuals fail to recognise expertise and competence and overestimate their ability but are also oblivious to social comparison information, i.e. they can’t use other people’s better/worse performance as information to evaluate their own performance. Intuitively, this argument seems very plausible. If one lacks the knowledge about a specific task/domain/situation how can one spot out his/her own mistakes? For instance, when I took a module in French, while studying for my BSc, I had to write short letters to demonstrate my knowledge of basic French, as part of the assessment. In those letters, that now seem very amusing, I was oblivious to all basic rules or French grammar and syntax, writing sentences that would be the equivalent of “Me go university very nice”. While writing such sentences I thought they were actually correct (until the results were given out). As the knowledge needed to write good French is the same knowledge needed to spot out mistakes in these writings, and as I lacked such knowledge at that stage, I thought I wrote correctly. Therefore, being overconfident about my ability to write good French was a result of my lack of grammatical and syntactic knowledge.
The fact that we favorably compare ourselves to others, as demonstrated by research, makes me think whether appart from knowledge levels, individual differences are into play in illusory superiority effects as well. Do people that score higher in self esteem overestimate their performance and rate themselves above others (as a result of their higher optimism and self esteem) or do those with lower self esteem belittle others (and as a result, seemingly overestimate themselves) in order to strengthen their fragile self concept, as perhaps a psychotherapist would assert?
Nonetheless, regardless of my own levels of self esteem (that oscillate between inexistence and oblivion) I wonder how much I actually knew about a particular domain, when I judged myself to be ‘better than average’ in it. Hmm…
Hoorens, Vera (1993). Self-enhancement and Superiority Biases in Social Comparison. European Review of Social Psychology, 4, (1): 113–139.
Keillor, G. (1985). Lake Wobegon Days. New York: Viking.
Kruger, Justin; David Dunning (1999). "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments". Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77, (6): 1121–34.
No comments:
Post a Comment