November 22, 2004

Too dumb to realize they're too dumb

And in the "the more I know, the more I know I don't know" department, it appears that the opposite is true. A study in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments indicates that the more incompetant the study participant, the more certain they were they were doing just fine:

Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error.

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Posted by roadnick at November 22, 2004 03:37 PM | TrackBack

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