Flawed Self-Assessment

[Suzanne Sutton]

Flawed Self-Assessment

David Dunning played the cello seriously as a teen--and he thought himself quite talented. Then he heard a recording of Jacqueline du Pre, the late English cellist who was renowned for playing with a brilliant ferocity. "So that's what you do with that instrument," a chastened Dunning, now professor of psychology at Cornell Univ., recalls thinking. "I had no clue that you could do that with the cello."

Dunning's epiphany is a clasic example of a phenomenon familiar to social psychologists: flawed self-assessment. People--as researchers have documented again and again--systematically misjudge their competence, virtues, relevance and future actions. And those erroneous views can, researchers say, endanger health, ruin relationships, dent finances and cause other misery.

People, for the most part, consider themselves smarter, luckier, better looking and more important than they really are. They regard themselves as exceptional and believe that they will avoid the divorces, premature deaths or weight gains that befall everyone else. Self-serving biases permeate people's perceptions. They claim credit for good deeds and successes but shift blame to others for their failures. A Toronto motorist captured this tendency on an insurance form: "A pedestrian hit me and went under my car."

"Most of us have a good reputation with ourselves," notes David Myers, a professor at Hope College in Holland, Mich., who wrote the textbook, "Social Psychology."

People's high self-regard tends to be unjustified, social psychologists say. The link between people's personal estimations and the not-so-flattering reality is sometimes perilously weak. Researchers at Australia's University of New England reviewed 128 studies a few years ago and calculated that people's perceptions of their intelligence versus their actual performance on tests and academic tasks had an average correlation of less than 0.3. A perfect correlation is 1.

Another study showed that 94% of college professors ranked themselves as above average, even though by definition only 50% can be in the top half. Indeed, the least skilled people have the most exaggerated sense of their abilities. Dunning and a colleague conducted several studies to test theories about incompetence and inflated sell-assessment.

(Continued in next posting....)

Suzanne

[Suzanne Sutton]

Flawed Self-Assessment, (con't)

45 Cornell undergraduates took tests on logical reasoning and estimated how their test scores would compare to that of their classmates. The students who performed in the top quarter lowballed their actual scores and rankings. But those in the bottom quarter were grossly off mark. They misjudged that their scores would fall at the 62nd percentile instead of the actual 12th percentile. Conclusion: Incompetent people are doubly handicapped because they lack not only the requisite skills but the ability to recognize their own deficiencies.

Some social psychologists argue that shortcomings in self-assessment in laboratories are inconsequential or artificial. But researchers have amassed persuasive data showing that people--at least North Americans--commit systematic errors in perceptions that can jeopardize their health, sabotage careers and even world peace.

People with unrealistic optimism are more likely to chance high-risk sex or disregard doctors' orders. They also risk wasting money on gym memberships by overestimating how often they will work out, Dunning said, or by miscalculating how carefully they will monitor their cell phone minutes.

Employees with flawed self-views might reject their supervisor's valid, but negative, reviews. Then they feel cheated with their "paltry" raises. Husbands and wives separately tallying how much each contributes to household chores produce estimates that add up to more than 100%.

Inflated self-views may not be all bad. They can buffer people from stress and depression and motivate them to keep after challenging tasks, Myers says. But on the whole, he contends, errors in perception bear blame for much of life's disharmony. "It's at the root of many divorces, as both partners see themselves as contributing more and benefiting less than their counterparts," Myers said.

So, how do we get a true, or at least truer, picture of ourselves? One way may be a "self-regulation" model professor Glenn Regehr and colleagues at the Univ. of Toronto Faculty of Medicine are promoting. It involves medical professionals seeking formalized feedback from peers, patients and standardized tests to identify their practice habits and outcomes. External feedback is critical because recognizing our own biases is intrinsically difficult. "It's like trying to scratch an itch in the middle of your back," said Chip Heath, professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University. "You can do it, but it's easier for someone else to help you out."

Health has examined ways that companies and organizations can compensate for individual biases. People tend to form views based on limited and biased information (it rains only after I wash my car) or they over-rely on vivid but minor evidence (a glowing recommendation from someone who barely knows the applicant). Companies can counterbalance those tendencies Heath said, by assembling broad, objective, relevant facts to form decisions.

This technique works for individuals, too, Dunning notes. Frank feedback from spouses, children, bosses or colleagues can yield enlightenment for those secure enough to seek it. If they concur that your humor is insipid, your body is unfit for skinny jeans and your musicianship is merely middling, Dunning says "you might consider the possibility that it might be true. The road to honest self-insight runs through other people." --Press-Enterprise, Jan. 1, 2007.

Suzanne

[teresaq]

The students who performed in the top quarter lowballed their actual scores and rankings. But those in the bottom quarter were grossly off mark. They misjudged that their scores would fall at the 62nd percentile instead of the actual 12th percentile.

a true benefit of humility if ever i saw one!

the higher we think of ourselves the worse we are, yet,

the lower we consider ourselves the higher we are...

as long as it is true humility....

[Bravus]

I think the article is generally useful, but would add two caveats:

1. It seems to take our potential as fixed, finite and objective: to claim that there is a true answer about who and what we are and what we can do, and the article is about comparing perceptions to that answer. I'd argue that we're more mutable than that. Other people can do amazing things on the guitar that I can't, but my playing gives me and others pleasure, and if I give it up, I'll never get better at it. In other words, we can *change* our abilities, in many cases, by working at them. Even IQ in raw terms doesn't mean much - it's the knowledge we acquire, and even more importantly the practice in thinking, that makes intelligence valuable.

2. There's value in believing we are capable, because by believing we become. I'm not talking about overweening pride, but about an 'I can' attitude more than an 'I can't' on. If you believe you can't you can't. You miss 100% of the shots at goal you don't take.

"A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for" said Robert Browning.

[Bravus]

Guess it depends on whether the question was 'above the average for college professors' or 'above the average for the whole community'. If you're talking intelligence and knowledge, and if the question is the latter, then the 94% figure is slightly high, but it's not true that only 50% of college professors are above the average of all the people in the community on this measure...