Why the unskilled are unaware: Further explorations of (absent) self-insight among the incompetent

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Abstract

People are typically overly optimistic when evaluating the quality of their performance on social and intellectual tasks. In particular, poor performers grossly overestimate their performances because their incompetence deprives them of the skills needed to recognize their deficits. Five studies demonstrated that poor performers lack insight into their shortcomings even in real world settings and when given incentives to be accurate. An additional meta-analysis showed that it was lack of insight into their own errors (and not mistaken assessments of their peers) that led to overly optimistic estimates among poor performers. Along the way, these studies ruled out recent alternative accounts that have been proposed to explain why poor performers hold such positive impressions of their performance.

Section snippets

(Absent) Self-insight among the incompetent

Why are people typically so convinced that they are more capable than they, in fact, are? In recent years, an active and emerging literature has grown to explain errors in self-assessment. One strategy for understanding the sources of error in self-assessment is to identify those individuals who make the most mistaken self-judgments. By examining how these error-prone individuals differ from their more accurate peers, one can identify sources of error in general.

Adopting this approach, Kruger

Goals of the present research

The primary aim of this manuscript is to advance an understanding of why the incompetent, in particular, tend to lack self-insight. Although a growing body of evidence has provided support for the claim that incompetence hinders self-insight (e.g., Dunning et al., 2003, Haun et al., 2000, Hodges et al., 2001), this analysis has been subject to criticism. These critiques argue that the self-assessment errors observed by Kruger and Dunning can be largely reduced to statistical or methodological

Metacognitive error or statistical artifact?

Two alternative accounts have been published to explain the pattern of over- and underestimation of performance observed by Kruger and Dunning (1999). Central to these critiques is the notion that top and bottom performers actually do not differ in their ability to evaluate the quality of their own performances. Instead, it is argued, people of all skill levels have equal difficulty estimating the quality of their performance—and it is this shared difficulty, coupled with statistical or

The present investigations

The following studies were designed to address the above critiques and, more generally, provide a better understanding of the relationship between level of skill and accuracy in self-assessment. We have organized the studies described in this manuscript in three sections, each with a separate aim.

Section 1: Correcting for reliability in self-assessments for real world tasks

All too often, social psychological research remains in the laboratory and we are left to infer that the same phenomenon routinely occur in the real world. For this reason, the discipline is often open to the criticism that what we find is limited to particular contrived laboratory situations or to particular demographics (e.g., Mintz et al., 2006, Sears, 1986). Thus, those few opportunities to measure social psychological phenomenon in the real world are particularly valuable. Real world

Section 2: Incentives for accuracy

The studies comprising Section 2 were designed, in part, to address another aspect of ecological validity. One could argue that participants are not properly motivated to offer accurate self-assessment. People just want to think good things about themselves while denying bad things—a tendency that has been documented quite strongly across several decades of psychological research (Baumeister and Newman, 1994, Dunning, 2001, Kunda, 1990). Beyond this motive, there is the motive to impress the

Section 3: Sources of inaccuracy in performance estimates

In this final section, we turn attention to the psychological mechanisms behind poor performers’ inability to recognize the deficient nature of their own performance relative to others and top performers to identify the exceptional nature of their own. When poor performers thought they were outperforming a majority of their peers, why were they so mistaken? When top performers failed to recognize how superior their performance was relative to others, why did they fail to recognize this fact?

General discussion

As Bertrand Russell so sagely noted in the quotation that opens this manuscript, the confidence people hold is often not matched by their actual achievement. Understanding why confidence and competence so rarely match has been an enduring interest in cognitive, social, personality, organizational, and clinical psychology (for reviews, see Dunning, 2005, Dunning et al., 2004, Lichtenstein et al., 1982).

In this manuscript, we examined the relationship between self-insight and level of competence.

Concluding remarks

Taken together, these findings reaffirm the notion that poor performers show little insight into the depth of their deficiencies relative to their peers. They tend to think they are doing just fine relative to their peers when, in fact, they are at the bottom of the performance distribution. By now, this phenomenon has been demonstrated even for everyday tasks, about which individuals have likely received substantial feedback regarding their level of knowledge and skill. College students have,

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  • Cited by (0)

    We thank Alba Cabral, Leah Doane, Alex Emmot, Donny Thometz, Kevin van Aelst, and Nathalie Vizueta for assisting in the collection of data. We also thank members of the Dunning laboratory and, in particular, Nicholas Epley, for many helpful suggestions. This research was supported financially by National Institute of Mental Health Grant RO1 56072, awarded to Dunning.

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