Imperfect Self-Assessments

We focus on the metacognitive skills of the incompetent to explain that people are so imperfect in appraising themselves and their abilities. 1

This is best seen in the “above-average effect”.

This is the tendency of the average person to believe he or she is above average.

For example:

high school students tend to see themselves as having more ability in leadership, getting along with others, and written expression than their peers (College Board, 1976-1977)
business managers view themselves as more able than the typical manager (Larwood & Whittaker, 1977)
football players see themselves as more football savvy than their teammates (Felson, 1981).

The metacognitive deficits of the unskilled explain this tendency toward inflated self-appraisals.

People usually choose what they think is the most reasonable and optimal option (Metcalfe, 1998).

The failure to recognize that one has performed poorly will instead leave one to assume that one has performed well.

As a result, the incompetent will tend to grossly overestimate their skills and abilities.

Competence and Metacognitive Skills

Incompetent individuals lack the metacognitive skills necessary for accurate self-assessment.

Novices possess poorer metacognitive skills than experts.

In physics, novices are less accurate than experts in judging the difficulty of physics problems (Chi et al., 1982).
In chess, novices are less calibrated than experts about how many times they need to see a given chessboard position before they are able to reproduce it correctly (Chi, 1978).
In tennis, novices are less likely than experts to successfully gauge whether specific play attempts were successful (McPherson & Thomas, 1989).

These findings suggest that unaccomplished individuals do not have the metacognitive skills necessary for accurate self-assessment that more accomplished people have.

This research does not examine whether:

metacognitive deficiencies translate into inflated self-assessments
the relatively incompetent (novices) are systematically more miscalibrated about their ability than the competent (experts).

There is some evidence that the incompetent are less able than their more skilled peers to gauge their own level of competence.

For example, Fagot and O’Brien (1994) found that socially incompetent boys were largely unaware of their lack of social graces (see Bern & Lord, 1979, for a similar result involving college students).

Mediocre students are less accurate than other students at evaluating their course performance (Moreland, Miller, & Laucka, 1981).

Unskilled readers are less able to assess their text comprehension than are more skilled readers (Maki, Jonas, & Kallod, 1994).

Students doing poorly on tests less accurately predict which questions they will get right than do students doing well (Shaughnessy, 1979; Sinkavich, 1995).

Drivers involved in accidents or flunking a driving exam predict their performance on a reaction test less accurately than do more accomplished and experienced drivers (Kunkel, 1971).

However, none of these studies has examined whether deficient metacognitive skills underlie these miscalibrations, nor have they tied these miscalibrations to the above-average effect.

Predictions

These shards of empirical evidence suggest that:

incompetent individuals have more difficulty recognizing their true level of ability
a lack of metacognitive skills causes this deficiency

We made 4 specific predictions about the links between competence, metacognitive ability, and inflated self-assessment.

Prediction 1. Incompetent individuals will dramatically overestimate their ability and performance relative to objective criteria.

Prediction 2. Incompetent individuals will suffer from deficient metacognitive skills

They have difficulty recognizing competence in others.

And so incompetent individuals will be unable to use information about the choices and performances of others to form more accurate impressions of their own ability.

Prediction 4. The incompetent can gain insight about their shortcomings.

But this comes (paradoxically) by making them more competent, thus providing them the metacognitive skills necessary to be able to realize that they have performed poorly.

The Studies

We explored these predictions in 4 studies. In each, we presented participants with tests that assessed their ability in a domain in which knowledge, wisdom, or savvy was crucial:

Humor (Study 1)
Logical reasoning (Studies 2-and 4)
English grammar (Study 3)

We then asked participants to assess their ability and test performance.

In all studies, we predicted that:

participants would overestimate their ability.
the incompetent would be unaware that they had performed poorly.

Incompetence is a matter of degree and not one of absolutes. There is no categorical bright line that separates “competent” individuals from “incompetent” ones. Thus, when we speak of “incompetent” individuals we mean people who are less competent than their peers.

Second, we have focused our analysis on the incompetence individuals display in specific domains.

We make no claim that they would be incompetent in any other domains, although many a colleague has pulled us aside to tell us a tale of a person they know who is “domaingeneral” incompetent.

Those people may exist, but they are not the focus of this research.

For example, their score would fall in the 10th or 15th percentile among their peers.

But they would estimate that it fell much higher (Prediction 1).

Of course, this overestimation could be taken as a mathematical verity.

If one has a low score, one has a better chance of overestimating one’s performance than underestimating it.

Thus, the real question in these studies is how much those who scored poorly would be rniscalibrated with respect to their performance.

In addition, we wanted to examine the relationship between miscalibrated views of ability and metacognitive skills, which we operationalized as:

(a) the ability to distinguish what one has answered correctly from what one has answered incorrectly
(b) the ability to recognize competence in others.

Thus, in Study 4, we asked participants to:

estimate their overall performance and ability
indicate which specific test items they believed they had answered correctly and which incorrectly

In Study 3, we showed competent and incompetent individuals the responses of others.

We assessed how well participants from each group could spot good and poor performances.

In both studies, we predicted that the incompetent would manifest poorer metacognitive skills than would their more competent peers (Prediction 2).

We also wanted to find out what experiences or interventions would make low performers realize the true level of performance that they had attained.

Thus, in Study 3, we asked participants to reassess their own ability after they had seen the responses of their peers. We predicted that competent individuals would learn from observing the responses of others, thereby becoming better calibrated about the quality of their performance relative to their peers. Incompetent participants, in contrast, would not (Prediction 3).

In Study 4, we gave participants training in the domain of logical reasoning and explored whether this newfound competence would prompt incompetent individuals toward a better understanding of the true level of their ability and test performance (Prediction 4).

Imperfect Self-Assessments