It several years old, but this story about a study of how poor performers evaluated themselves keeps popping up in Del.cio.us and more-or-less confirms my earlier speculations about the poor self-monitoring skills that some people seem to have.
David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell, and Justin Kruger, then a graduate student at Cornell, tested subjects on logic, English grammar and humor, and then asked the subjects to rate how well they did.
For people in the top who scored above the 25th percentile, their ratings were positively correlated with their actually performance — i.e., the middling to high performs had a fairly good idea of whether they had performed middling or well. But those in the bottom quartile tended to greatly over-estimate how well they had performed.
According to The New York Times,
Asked to evaluate their performance on the test of logical reasoning, for example, subjects who scored only in the 12th percentile guessed that they had scored in the 62nd percentile, and deemed their overall skill at logical reasoning to be at the 68th percentile.
Similarly, subjects who scored at the 10th percentile on the grammar test ranked themselves at the 67th percentile in the ability to “identify grammatically correct standard English,” and estimated their test scores to be at the 61st percentile.
The high achiever actually tended to underestimate their performance, but once the researchers gave them some idea of how others had performed by having the subjects assist in grading the tests of others, they tended to accurately rate their own performance. Oddly enough, after assisting in grading the tests of others, the low performers had a tendency to overestimate even further their own performance.
One explanation is that self-evaluation requires the very skills, such as logical reasoning, that the poor performers are lacking in. But there’s another interesting possible factor,
In various situations, feedback is absent, or at least ambiguous; even a humorless joke, for example, is likely to be met with polite laughter. And faced with incompetence, social norms prevent most people from blurting out “You stink!”– truthful though this assessment may be.
As I’ve said before, the key to success in life is not to bullshit yourself.
Source:
Incompetent People Really Have No Clue, Studies Find. Erica Goode, The New York Times, January 18, 2006.