چرا افراد فاقد مهارت بی اطلاع هستند: اکتشافات بیشتر از خودبینش در میان افراد بی کفایت

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.

One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision Bertrand Russell (1951) As Bertrand Russell noted, those most confident in their level of expertise and skill are not necessarily those who should be. Surveys of the psychological literature suggest that perception of skill is often only modestly correlated with actual level of performance, a pattern found not only in the laboratory but also in the classroom, health clinic, and the workplace (for reviews, see Dunning, 2005, Dunning et al., 2004, Ehrlinger and Dunning, 2003, Falchikov and Boud, 1989, Harris and Schaubroeck, 1988 and Mabe and West, 1982). Surveys of the literature also suggest that people hold positive beliefs about their competence to a logically impossible degree (for reviews, see Alicke and Govorun, 2005, Dunning, 2005 and Dunning et al., 2004). In one common example of this tendency, several research studies have shown that the average person, when asked, typically claims that he or she is “above average”, (Alicke, 1985, Brown, 1986, Dunning et al., 1989 and Weinstein, 1980) which is, of course, statistically impossible. These biased self-evaluations are seen in important real world settings as well as the laboratory. In a survey of engineers at one company, for example, 42% thought their work ranked in the top 5% among their peers (Zenger, 1992), a fact that could easily impede their motivation to improve. Elderly people tend to believe they are “above average” drivers (Marottoli & Richardson, 1998), a perception that that is, in reality, associated with being labeled an unsafe driver (Freund, Colgrove, Burke, & McLeod, 2005). Even academics are not immune. A survey of college professors revealed that 94% thought they do “above average” work—a figure that defies mathematical plausibility (Cross, 1977).

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, through out their education, received feedback on their grammatical and logical skills, the domains in which poor metacognitive ability among the unskilled was first demonstrated (Kruger & Dunning, 1999). Similarly, medical lab technicians do not recognize when they are performing poorly on a test of the skills they use in the lab every day (Haun et al., 2000). In this manuscript, we asked college students to assess how well they had done on a course exam and experienced debaters whether they were winning matches. Yet, in each of these familiar circumstances, poor performing participants did not seem to know how poorly they were doing. Part of why the dramatic overestimation demonstrated by poor performers is so fascinating is precisely because they show dramatic overconfidence on tasks about which they have likely received substantial feedback in the past. While this issue is beyond the scope of the present manuscript, we remain fascinated by the question of why it is that poor performers do not give accurate performance evaluations on familiar tasks. It seems that poor performers do not learn from feedback suggesting a need to improve. Hacker, Bol, Horgan, and Rakow (2000) provided direct evidence for this failure to learn from feedback when they tracked students during a semester-long class. As time went on, good students became more accurate in predicting how they would do on future exams. The poorest performers did not—showing no recognition, despite clear and repeated feedback, that they were doing badly. As a consequence, they continued to provide overly optimistic predictions about how well they would do in future tests. We hope that future research might shed light on the motivational and cognitive contributors to this failure to update predictions in the light of negative feedback on past performances. If one cannot rely on life experience to teach people about their deficits, how are people to gain self-insight? While this seems a difficult task, there are clues in the psychological literature that suggest strategies for gaining self-insight. If a lack of skill leads to an inability to evaluate the quality of one’s performances, one means of improving metacognitive ability—and thus self-insight—is to improve one’s level of skill. Kruger and Dunning (1999) found that training students in logic did, indeed, improve their ability to distinguish correct from incorrect answers and, concurrently, improved the quality of their performances. We might than encourage greater self-insight just by encouraging learning. Surely, we cannot expect individuals to gain some level of competence in all areas just so that they may better understand their strengths and weaknesses. However, it is quite possible to encourage a mindset that leads to greater excitement about learning and, by extension greater self-insight. Dweck and colleagues find that encouraging beliefs in the malleability of traits leads to a host of behaviors that might contribute to more accurate perceptions of one’s abilities (for review, see Dweck, 1999). This approach might lead to more accurate self-assessment for the same reason that Kruger and Dunning (1999) training in logic was effective—by improving people’s level of skill. School children who are taught that intelligence is malleable get more excited about learning, become more motivated in the classroom and achieve better grades (Blackwell, Trzesniewski, & Dweck, 2007). Thus, teaching individuals that intelligence is malleable might lead to more accurate self-assessments because this measure leads to an improvement of knowledge and skill that, in and of itself, promotes greater self-insight. In addition, teaching individuals that traits and, in particular, intelligence is malleable also leads to a greater openness to challenging new tasks (Dweck and Leggett, 1988 and Hong et al., 1999). Experience with a variety of tasks is likely to provide individuals with extensive feedback from which they may garner information about their abilities. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, recent research reveals that individuals who hold a view that intelligence is malleable make far more accurate assessments of the quality of their performance than do those who believe intelligence to be fixed (Ehrlinger & Dweck, 2007). Often those with a malleable view of intelligence are not at all overconfident on tasks that inspire dramatic overconfidence in those with a fixed view of the trait. Further, teaching individuals about the malleability of intelligence results in less overconfident assessments of performance (Ehrlinger & Dweck, 2007). Thus, teachers might help students to better identify what are their strengths and where they need to improve just by imparting knowledge and also by teaching an incremental view of intelligence. These lines of research are exciting in that these among the first strategies identified to help individuals gain greater self-insight however it is also time intensive and considerably easier to implement with students than with adults outside of educational contexts. Further research might explore more general means of improving insight into one’s level of skill and one’s character. These are crucial questions to address in future research.