In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into two Pittsburgh banks and robbed
them in broad daylight, with no visible attempt at disguise. He was
arrested later that night, less than an hour after videotapes of him taken
from surveillance cameras were broadcast on the 11 o'clock news. When
police later showed him the surveillance tapes, Mr. Wheeler stared in
incredulity. "But I wore the juice," he mumbled. Apparently, Mr. Wheeler
was under the impression that rubbing one's face with lemon juice rendered
it invisible to videotape cameras ( Fuocco, 1996
).
We bring up the unfortunate affairs of Mr. Wheeler to make three
points. The first two are noncontroversial. First, in many domains in
life, success and satisfaction depend on knowledge, wisdom, or savvy in
knowing which rules to follow and which strategies to pursue. This is true
not only for committing crimes, but also for many tasks in the social and
intellectual domains, such as promoting effective leadership, raising
children, constructing a solid logical argument, or designing a rigorous
psychological study. Second, people differ widely in the knowledge and
strategies they apply in these domains ( Dunning,
Meyerowitz, & Holzberg, 1989 ; Dunning, Perie,
& Story, 1991 ; Story &
Dunning, 1998 ), with varying levels of success. Some of the knowledge
and theories that people apply to their actions are sound and meet with
favorable results. Others, like the lemon juice hypothesis of McArthur
Wheeler, are imperfect at best and wrong-headed, incompetent, or
dysfunctional at worst.
Perhaps more controversial is the third point, the one that is the
focus of this article. We argue that when people are incompetent in the
strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a
dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make
unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to
realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the mistaken
impression that they are doing just fine. As Miller (1993)
perceptively observed in the quote that opens this article, and as Charles Darwin
(1871) sagely noted over a century ago, "ignorance more frequently
begets confidence than does knowledge" (p. 3).
In essence, we argue that the skills that engender competence in a
particular domain are often the very same skills necessary to evaluate
competence in that domain–one's own or anyone else's. Because of this,
incompetent individuals lack what cognitive psychologists variously term
metacognition ( Everson &
Tobias, 1998 ), metamemory ( Klin, Guizman,
& Levine, 1997 ), metacomprehension ( Maki, Jonas,
& Kallod, 1994 ), or self-monitoring skills ( Chi, Glaser,
& Rees, 1982 ). These terms refer to the ability to know how well
one is performing, when one is likely to be accurate in judgment, and when
one is likely to be in error. For example, consider the ability to write
grammatical English. The skills that enable one to construct a grammatical
sentence are the same skills necessary to recognize a grammatical
sentence, and thus are the same skills necessary to determine if a
grammatical mistake has been made. In short, the same knowledge that
underlies the ability to produce correct judgment is also the knowledge
that underlies the ability to recognize correct judgment. To lack the
former is to be deficient in the latter.
The Studies
We explored these predictions in four 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), and English grammar (Study 3). We then asked
participants to assess their ability and test performance. In all studies,
we predicted that participants in general would overestimate their ability
and performance relative to objective criteria. But more to the point, we
predicted that those who proved to be incompetent (i.e., those who scored
in the bottom quarter of the distribution) would be unaware that they had
performed poorly. 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
miscalibrated 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 and (b) the ability to
recognize competence in others. Thus, in Study 4, we asked participants to
not only estimate their overall performance and ability, but to 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 and 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).
Study 1: Humor
In Study 1, we decided to explore people's perceptions of their
competence in a domain that requires sophisticated knowledge and wisdom
about the tastes and reactions of other people. That domain was humor. To
anticipate what is and what others will find funny, one must have subtle
and tacit knowledge about other people's tastes. Thus, in Study 1 we
presented participants with a series of jokes and asked them to rate the
humor of each one. We then compared their ratings with those provided by a
panel of experts, namely, professional comedians who make their living by
recognizing what is funny and reporting it to their audiences. By
comparing each participant's ratings with those of our expert panel, we
could roughly assess participants' ability to spot humor.
Our key interest was how perceptions of that ability converged with
actual ability. Specifically, we wanted to discover whether those who did
poorly on our measure would recognize the low quality of their
performance. Would they recognize it or would they be unaware?
Method
Participants.
Participants were 65 Cornell
University undergraduates from a variety of courses in psychology who
earned extra credit for their participation.
Materials.
We created a 30-item questionnaire made
up of jokes we felt were of varying comedic value. Jokes were taken from
Gender failed to qualify any results in this or any of the studies
reported in this article, and thus receives no further mention.
Our first prediction was that participants overall would overestimate
their ability to tell what is funny relative to their peers. To find out
whether this was the case, we first assigned each participant a percentile
rank based on the extent to which his or her joke ratings correlated with
the ratings provided by our panel of professionals (with higher
correlations corresponding to better performance). On average,
participants put their ability to recognize what is funny in the 66th
percentile, which exceeded the actual mean percentile (50, by definition)
by 16 percentile points, one-sample t (64) = 7.02, p <
.0001. This overestimation occurred even though self-ratings of ability
were significantly correlated with our measure of actual ability, r
(63) = .39, p < .001.
Our main focus, however, is on the perceptions of relatively
"incompetent" participants, which we defined as those whose test score
fell in the bottom quartile ( n = 16). As Figure 1
depicts, these participants grossly overestimated their ability
relative to their peers. Whereas their actual performance fell in the 12th
percentile, they put themselves in the 58th percentile. These estimates
were not only higher than the ranking they actually achieved, paired t
(15) = 10.33, p < .0001, but were also marginally higher
than a ranking of "average" (i.e., the 50th percentile), one-sample t
(15) = 1.96, p < .07. That is, even participants in the
bottom quarter of the distribution tended to feel that they were better
than average.
In short, Study 1 revealed two effects of interest. First, although
perceptions of ability were modestly correlated with actual ability,
people tended to overestimate their ability relative to their peers.
Second, and most important, those who performed particularly poorly
relative to their peers were utterly unaware of this fact. Participants
scoring in the bottom quartile on our humor test not only overestimated
their percentile ranking, but they overestimated it by 46 percentile
points. To be sure, they had an inkling that they were not as talented in
this domain as were participants in the top quartile, as evidenced by the
significant correlation between perceived and actual ability. However,
that suspicion failed to anticipate the magnitude of their shortcomings.
At first blush, the reader may point to the regression effect as an
alternative interpretation of our results. After all, we examined the
perceptions of people who had scored extremely poorly on the objective
test we handed them, and found that their perceptions were less extreme
than their reality. Because perceptions of ability are imperfectly
correlated with actual ability, the regression effect virtually guarantees
this result. Moreover, because incompetent participants scored close to
the bottom of the distribution, it was nearly impossible for them to
underestimate their performance.
Despite the inevitability of the regression effect, we believe that the
overestimation we observed was more psychological than artifactual. For
one, if regression alone were to blame for our results, then the magnitude
of miscalibration among the bottom quartile would be comparable with that
of the top quartile. A glance at Figure 1
quickly disabuses one of this notion. Still, we believe this issue
warrants empirical attention, which we devote in Studies 3 and 4.
We conducted Study 2 with three goals in mind. First, we wanted to
replicate the results of Study 1 in a different domain, one focusing on
intellectual rather than social abilities. We chose logical reasoning, a
skill central to the academic careers of the participants we tested and a
skill that is called on frequently. We wondered if those who do poorly
relative to their peers on a logical reasoning test would be unaware of
their poor performance.
Examining logical reasoning also enabled us to compare perceived and
actual ability in a domain less ambiguous than the one we examined in the
previous study. It could reasonably be argued that humor, like beauty, is
in the eye of the beholder. 2
Indeed, the imperfect interrater reliability among
our group of professional comedians suggests that there is considerable
variability in what is considered funny even by experts. This criterion
problem, or lack of uncontroversial criteria against which
self-perceptions can be compared, is particularly problematic in light of
the tendency to define ambiguous traits and abilities in ways that
emphasize one's own strengths ( Dunning et al.,
1989 ). Thus, it may have been the tendency to define humor
idiosyncratically, and in ways favorable to one's tastes and
sensibilities, that produced the miscalibration we observed–not the
tendency of the incompetent to miss their own failings. By examining
logical reasoning skills, we could circumvent this problem by presenting
students with questions for which there is a definitive right answer.
Finally, we wanted to introduce another objective criterion with which
we could compare participants' perceptions. Because percentile ranking is
by definition a comparative measure, the miscalibration we saw could have
come from either of two sources. In the comparison, participants may have
overestimated their own ability (our contention) or may have
underestimated the skills of their peers. To address this issue, in Study
2 we added a second criterion with which to compare participants'
perceptions. At the end of the test, we asked participants to estimate how
many of the questions they had gotten right and compared their estimates
with their actual test scores. This enabled us to directly examine whether
the incompetent are, indeed, miscalibrated with respect to their own
ability and performance.
The order in which specific questions were asked did not affect any of
the results in this or in any of the studies reported in this article and
thus receives no further mention.
As expected, participants overestimated their logical reasoning ability
relative to their peers. On average, participants placed themselves in the
66th percentile among students from their class, which was significantly
higher than the actual mean of 50, one-sample t (44) = 8.13, p
< .0001. Participants also overestimated their percentile rank on
the test, M percentile = 61, one-sample t (44) = 4.70, p
< .0001. Participants did not, however, overestimate how many
questions they answered correctly, M = 13.3 (perceived) vs. 12.9
(actual), t < 1. As in Study 1, perceptions of ability were
positively related to actual ability, although in this case, not to a
significant degree. The correlations between actual ability and the three
perceived ability and performance measures ranged from .05 to .19, all
ns.
What (or rather, who) was responsible for this gross miscalibration? To
find out, we once again split participants into quartiles based on their
performance on the test. As Figure 2
clearly illustrates, it was participants in the bottom quartile ( n
= 11) who overestimated their logical reasoning ability and test
performance to the greatest extent. Although these individuals scored at
the 12th percentile on average, they nevertheless believed that their
general logical reasoning ability fell at the 68th percentile and their
score on the test fell at the 62nd percentile. Their estimates not only
exceeded their actual percentile scores, t s(10) = 17.2 and 11.0,
respectively, p s < .0001, but exceeded the 50th percentile as
well, t s(10) = 4.93 and 2.31, respectively, p s < .05.
Thus, participants in the bottom quartile not only overestimated
themselves but believed that they were above average. Similarly, they
thought they had answered 14.2 problems correctly on average–compared with
the actual mean score of 9.6, t (10) = 7.66, p < .0001.
In sum, Study 2 replicated the primary results of Study 1 in a
different domain. Participants in general overestimated their logical
reasoning ability, and it was once again those in the bottom quartile who
showed the greatest miscalibration. It is important to note that these
same effects were observed when participants considered their percentile
score, ruling out the criterion problem discussed earlier. Lest one think
these results reflect erroneous peer assessment rather then erroneous
self-assessment, participants in the bottom quartile also overestimated
the number of test items they had gotten right by nearly 50%.
Study 3 was conducted in two phases. The first phase consisted of a
replication of the first two studies in a third domain, one requiring
knowledge of clear and decisive rules and facts: grammar. People may
differ in the worth they assign to American Standard Written English
(ASWE), but they do agree that such a standard exists, and they differ in
their ability to produce and recognize written documents that conform to
that standard.
Thus, in Study 3 we asked participants to complete a test assessing
their knowledge of ASWE. We also asked them to rate their overall ability
to recognize correct grammar, how their test performance compared with
that of their peers, and finally how many items they had answered
correctly on the test. In this way, we could see if those who did poorly
would recognize that fact.
After completing the test, participants compared their general ability
to "identify grammatically correct standard English" with that of other
students from their class on the same percentile scale used in the
previous studies. As in Study 2, participants also estimated the
percentile rank of their test performance among their student peers, as
well as the number of individual test items they had answered correctly.
As in Studies 1 and 2, participants overestimated their ability and
performance relative to objective criteria. On average, participants'
estimates of their grammar ability ( M percentile = 71) and
performance on the test ( M percentile = 68) exceeded the actual
mean of 50, one-sample t s(83) = 5.90 and 5.13, respectively, p
s < .0001. Participants also overestimated the number of items they
answered correctly, M = 15.2 (perceived) versus 13.3 (actual), t
(83) = 6.63, p < .0001. Although participants' perceptions
of their general grammar ability were uncorrelated with their actual test
scores, r (82) = .14, ns, their perceptions of how their
test performance would rank among their peers was correlated with their
actual score, albeit to a marginal degree, r (82) = .19, p
< .09, as was their direct estimate of their raw test score, r
(82) = .54, p < .0001.
As in previous studies, participants falling in other quartiles
overestimated their ability and performance much less than did those in
the bottom quartile. However, as Figure 3
shows, those in the top quartile once again underestimated themselves.
Whereas their test performance fell in the 89th percentile among their
peers, they rated their ability to be in the 72nd percentile and their
test performance in the 70th percentile, t s(18) = - 4.73 and - 5.08,
respectively, p s < .0001. Top-quartile participants did not,
however, underestimate their raw score on the test, M = 16.9
(perceived) versus 16.4 (actual), t (18) = 1.37, ns.
Thus far, we have shown that people who lack the knowledge or wisdom to
perform well are often unaware of this fact. We attribute this lack of
awareness to a deficit in metacognitive skill. That is, the same
incompetence that leads them to make wrong choices also deprives them of
the savvy necessary to recognize competence, be it their own or anyone
else's.
We designed a second phase of Study 3 to put the latter half of this
claim to a test. Several weeks after the first phase of Study 3, we
invited the bottom- and top-quartile performers from this study back to
the laboratory for a follow-up. There, we gave each group the tests of
five of their peers to "grade" and asked them to assess how competent each
target had been in completing the test. In keeping with Prediction 2, we
expected that bottom-quartile participants would have more trouble with
this metacognitive task than would their top-quartile counterparts.
This study also enabled us to explore Prediction 3, that incompetent
individuals fail to gain insight into their own incompetence by observing
the behavior of other people. One of the ways people gain insight into
their own competence is by comparing themselves with others ( Festinger, 1954
; Gilbert,
Giesler, & Morris, 1995 ). We reasoned that if the incompetent
cannot recognize competence in others, then they will be unable to make
use of this social comparison opportunity. To test this prediction, we
asked participants to reassess themselves after they have seen the
responses of their peers. We predicted that despite seeing the superior
test performances of their classmates, bottom-quartile participants would
continue to believe that they had performed competently.
In contrast, we expected that top-quartile participants, because they
have the metacognitive skill to recognize competence and incompetence in
others, would revise their self-ratings after the grading task. In
particular, we predicted that they would recognize that the performances
of the five individuals they evaluated were inferior to their own, and
thus would raise their estimates of their percentile ranking accordingly.
That is, top-quartile participants would learn from observing the
responses of others, whereas bottom-quartile participants would not.
In making these predictions, we felt that we could account for an
anomaly that appeared in all three previous studies: Despite the fact that
top- quartile participants were far more calibrated than were their less
skilled counterparts, they tended to underestimate their performance
relative to their peers. We felt that this miscalibration had a different
source then the miscalibration evidenced by bottom-quartile participants.
That is, top-quartile participants did not underestimate themselves
because they were wrong about their own performances, but rather because
they were wrong about the performances of their peers. In essence, we
believe they fell prey to the false-consensus effect ( Ross, Greene,
& House, 1977 ). In the absence of data to the contrary, they
mistakenly assumed that their peers would tend provide the same (correct)
answers as they themselves–an impression that could be immediately
corrected by showing them the performances of their peers. By examining
the extent to which competent individuals revised their ability estimates
after grading the tests of their less competent peers, we could put this
false-consensus interpretation to a test.
After this, participants were shown their own test again and were asked
to re-rate their ability and performance on the test relative to their
peers, using the same percentile scales as before. They also re-estimated
the number of test questions they had answered correctly.
With top-quartile participants, a completely different picture emerged.
As predicted, after grading the test performance of five of their peers,
top- quartile participants raised their estimates of their own general
grammar ability, t (18) = 2.07, p = .05, and their
percentile ranking on the test, t (18) = 3.61, p < .005.
These results are consistent with the false-consensus effect account we
have offered. Armed with the ability to assess competence and incompetence
in others, participants in the top quartile realized that the performances
of the five individuals they evaluated (and thus their peers in general)
were inferior to their own. As a consequence, top- quartile participants
became better calibrated with respect to their percentile ranking. Note
that a false-consensus interpretation does not predict any revision for
estimates of one's raw score, as learning of the poor performance of one's
peers conveys no information about how well one has performed in absolute
terms. Indeed, as Table 1
shows, no revision occurred, t (18) < 1.
This study also supported Prediction 3, that incompetent individuals
fail to gain insight into their own incompetence by observing the behavior
of other people. Despite seeing the superior performances of their peers,
bottom-quartile participants continued to hold the mistaken impression
that they had performed just fine. The story for high-performing
participants, however, was quite different. The accuracy of their self-
appraisals did improve. We attribute this finding to a false-consensus
effect. Simply put, because top-quartile participants performed so
adeptly, they assumed the same was true of their peers. After seeing the
performances of others, however, they were disabused of this notion, and
thus the they improved the accuracy of their self-appraisals. Thus, the
miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self,
whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error
about others.
The central proposition in our argument is that incompetent individuals
lack the metacognitive skills that enable them to tell how poorly they are
performing, and as a result, they come to hold inflated views of their
performance and ability. Consistent with this notion, we have shown that
incompetent individuals (compared with their more competent peers) are
unaware of their deficient abilities (Studies 1 through 3) and show
deficient metacognitive skills (Study 3).
The best acid test of our proposition, however, is to manipulate
competence and see if this improves metacognitive skills and thus the
accuracy of self-appraisals (Prediction 4). This would not only enable us
to speak directly to causality, but would help rule out the regression
effect alternative account discussed earlier. If the incompetent
overestimate themselves simply because their test scores are very low (the
regression effect), then manipulating competence after they take the test
ought to have no effect on the accuracy of their self-appraisals. If
instead it takes competence to recognize competence, then manipulating
competence ought to enable the incompetent to recognize that they have
performed poorly. Of course, there is a paradox to this assertion. It
suggests that the way to make incompetent individuals realize their own
incompetence is to make them competent.
In Study 4, that is precisely what we set out to do. We gave
participants a test of logic based on the Wason selection task ( Wason, 1966
) and asked them to assess themselves in a manner similar to that in
the previous studies. We then gave half of the participants a short
training session designed to improve their logical reasoning skills.
Finally, we tested the metacognitive skills of all participants by asking
them to indicate which items they had answered correctly and which
incorrectly (after McPherson &
Thomas, 1989 ) and to rate their ability and test performance once
more.
We predicted that training would provide incompetent individuals with
the metacognitive skills needed to realize that they had performed poorly
and thus would help them realize the limitations of their ability.
Specifically, we expected that the training would (a) improve the ability
of the incompetent to evaluate which test problems they had answered
correctly and which incorrectly and, in the process, (b) reduce the
miscalibration of their ability estimates.
After taking the test, participants were asked to rate their logical
reasoning skills and performance on the test relative to their classmates
on a percentile scale. They also estimated the number of problems they had
solved correctly.
Next, a random selection of 70 participants were given a short logical-
reasoning training packet. Modeled after work by Cheng and her colleagues
( Cheng,
Holyoak, Nisbett, & Oliver, 1986 ), this packet described
techniques for testing the veracity of logical syllogisms such as the
Wason selection task. The remaining 70 participants encountered an
unrelated filler task that took about the same amount of time (10 min) as
did the training packet.
Afterward, participants in both conditions completed a metacognition
task in which they went through their own tests and indicated which
problems they thought they had answered correctly and which incorrectly.
Participants then re-estimated the total number of problems they had
answered correctly and compared themselves with their peers in terms of
their general logical reasoning ability and their test performance.
Scores on the metacognition task supported the first part of this
prediction. To assess participants' metacognitive skills, we summed the
number of questions each participant accurately identified as correct or
incorrect, out of the 10 problems. Overall, participants who received the
training packet graded their own tests more accurately ( M = 9.3)
than did participants who did not receive the packet ( M = 6.3),
t (138) = 7.32, p < .0001, a difference even more
pronounced when looking at bottom- quartile participants exclusively, M
s = 9.3 versus 3.5, t (36) = 7.18, p < .0001. In
fact, the training packet was so successful that those who had originally
scored in the bottom quartile were just as accurate in monitoring their
test performance as were those who had initially scored in the top
quartile, M s = 9.3 and 9.9, respectively, t (30) = 1.38,
ns. In other words, the incompetent had become experts.
To test the second part of our prediction, we examined the impact of
training on participants' self-impressions in a series of 2 (training: yes
or no) × 2 (pre- vs. postmanipulation) × 4 (quartile: 1 through 4)
mixed-model analyses of variance (ANOVAs). These analyses revealed the
expected three-way interactions for estimates of general ability, F
(3, 132) = 2.49, p < .07, percentile score on the test, F
(3, 132) = 8.32, p < .001, and raw test score, F (3,
132) = 19.67, p < .0001, indicating that the impact of training
on self-assessment depended on participants' initial test performance. Table 2
displays how training influenced the degree of miscalibration
participants exhibited for each measure.
To examine these interactions in greater detail, we conducted two sets
of 2 (training: yes or no) × 2 (pre- vs. postmanipulation) ANOVAs. The
first looked at participants in the bottom quartile, the second at
participants in the top quartile. Among bottom-quartile participants, we
found the expected interactions for estimates of logical reasoning
ability, F (1, 35) = 6.67, p < .02, percentile test
score, F (1, 35) = 14.30, p < .002, and raw test score,
F (1, 35) = 41.0, p < .0001, indicating that the change
in participants' estimates of their ability and test performance depended
on whether they had received training.
No such increase in calibration was found for bottom-quartile
participants in the untrained group ( n = 18). As Table 2
shows, they initially reported that both their ability and score on
the test fell in the 55th percentile, and did not change those estimates
in their second set of self-ratings, all t s < 1. Their
estimates of their raw test score, however, did change–but in the wrong
direction. In their initial ratings, they estimated that they had solved
5.8 problems correctly. On their second ratings, they raised that estimate
to 6.3, t (17) = 2.62, p < .02.
For individuals who scored in the top quartile, training had a very
different effect. As we did for their bottom-quartile counterparts, we
conducted a set of 2 (training: yes or no) × 2 (pre- vs. postmanipulation)
ANOVAs. These analyses revealed significant interactions for estimates of
test performance, F (1, 26) = 6.39, p < .025, and raw
score, F (1, 26) = 4.95, p < .05, but not for estimates
of general ability, F (1, 26) = 1.03, ns.
In the first analysis, we examined objective performance, metacognitive
skill, and the accuracy of self-appraisals in a manner suggested by Baron and Kenny
(1986) . According to their procedure, metacognitive skill would be
shown to mediate the link between incompetence and inflated
self-assessment if (a) low levels of objective performance were associated
with inflated self- assessment, (b) low levels of objective performance
were associated with deficits in metacognitive skill, and (c) deficits in
metacognitive skill were associated with inflated self-assessment even
after controlling for objective performance. Focusing on the 70
participants in the untrained group, we found considerable evidence of
mediation. First, as reported earlier, participants' test performance was
a strong predictor of how much they overestimated their ability and test
performance. An additional analysis revealed that test performance was
also strongly related to metacognitive skill, b
(68) = .75, p < .0001. Finally, and most important,
deficits in metacognitive skill predicted inflated self-assessment on the
all three self-ratings we examined (general logical reasoning ability,
comparative performance on the test, and absolute score on the test)–even
after objective performance on the test was held constant. This was true
for the first set of self-appraisals, b s(67) =
- .40 to - .49, p
s < .001, as well as the second, b s(67) =
- .41 to - .50, p
s < .001. 5
Given these results, one could wonder whether the impact of training on
the self-assessments of participants in the bottom quartile was similarly
mediated by metacognitive skills. To find out, we conducted a mediational
analysis focusing on bottom quartile participants in both trained and
untrained groups. Here too, all three mediational links were supported. As
previously reported, bottom-quartile participants who received training
(a) provided less inflated self-assessments and (b) evidenced better
metacognitive skills than those who did not receive training. Completing
this analysis, regression analyses revealed that metacognitive skills
predicted inflated self-assessment with participants' training condition
held constant, b (34)s = -
.68 to - .97, p s < .01. In
fact, training itself failed to predict miscalibration when
bottom-quartile participants' metacognitive skills were taken into
account, b s(34) = .00 to .25, ns. These
analyses suggest that the benefit of training on the accuracy of
self-assessment was achieved by means of improved metacognitive skills. 6
General Discussion
In the neurosciences, practitioners and researchers occasionally come
across the curious malady of anosognosia. Caused by certain types of
damage to the right side of the brain, anosognosia leaves people paralyzed
on the left side of their body. But more than that, when doctors place a
cup in front of such patients and ask them to pick it up with their left
hand, patients not only fail to comply but also fail to understand why.
When asked to explain their failure, such patients might state that they
are tired, that they did not hear the doctor's instructions, or that they
did not feel like responding–but never that they are suffering from
paralysis. In essence, anosognosia not only causes paralysis, but also the
inability to realize that one is paralyzed ( D'Amasio, 1994
).
In this article, we proposed a psychological analogue to anosognosia.
We argued that incompetence, like anosognosia, not only causes poor
performance but also the inability to recognize that one's performance is
poor. Indeed, across the four studies, participants in the bottom quartile
not only overestimated themselves, but thought they were above-average,
Z = 4.64, p < .0001. In a phrase, Thomas Gray was right:
Ignorance is bliss– at least when it comes to assessments of one's own
ability.
What causes this gross overestimation? Studies 3 and 4 pointed to a
lack of metacognitive skills among less skilled participants.
Bottom-quartile participants were less successful than were top-quartile
participants in the metacognitive tasks of discerning what one has
answered correctly versus incorrectly (Study 4) and distinguishing
superior from inferior performances on the part of one's peers (Study 3).
More conclusively, Study 4 showed that improving participants'
metacognitive skills also improved the accuracy of their self-appraisals.
Note that these findings are inconsistent with a simple regression effect
interpretation of our results, which does not predict any changes in
self-appraisals given different levels of metacognitive skill. Regression
also cannot explain the fact that bottom-quartile participants were nearly
4 times more miscalibrated than their top-quartile counterparts.
Study 4 also revealed a paradox. It suggested that one way to make
people recognize their incompetence is to make them competent. Once we
taught bottom-quartile participants how to solve Wason selection tasks
correctly, they also gained the metacognitive skills to recognize the
previous error of their ways. Of course, and herein lies the paradox, once
they gained the metacognitive skills to recognize their own incompetence,
they were no longer incompetent. "To have such knowledge," as Miller (1993)
put it in the quote that began this article, "would already be to
remedy a good portion of the offense."
The Burden of Expertise
Although our emphasis has been on the miscalibration of incompetent
individuals, along the way we discovered that highly competent individuals
also show some systematic bias in their self appraisals. Across the four
sets of studies, participants in the top quartile tended to underestimate
their ability and test performance relative to their peers, Z s =
- 5.66 and - 4.77,
respectively, p s < .0001. What accounts for this
underestimation? Here, too, the regression effect seems a likely
candidate: Just as extremely low performances are likely to be associated
with slightly higher perceptions of performance, so too are extremely high
performances likely to be associated with slightly lower perceptions of
performance.
As it turns out, however, our data point to a more psychological
explanation. Specifically, top-quartile participants appear to have fallen
prey to a false-consensus effect ( Ross et al.,
1977 ). Simply put, these participants assumed that because they
performed so well, their peers must have performed well likewise. This
would have led top-quartile participants to underestimate their
comparative abilities (i.e., how their general ability and test
performance compare with that of their peers), but not their absolute
abilities (i.e., their raw score on the test). This was precisely the
pattern of data we observed: Compared with participants falling in the
third quartile, participants in the top quartile were an average of 23%
less calibrated in terms of their comparative performance on the test–but
16% more calibrated in terms of their objective performance on the test.
7
More conclusive evidence came from Phase 2 of Study 3. Once
top-quartile participants learned how poorly their peers had performed,
they raised their self-appraisals to more accurate levels. We have argued
that unskilled individuals suffer a dual burden: Not only do they perform
poorly, but they fail to realize it. It thus appears that extremely
competent individuals suffer a burden as well. Although they perform
competently, they fail to realize that their proficiency is not
necessarily shared by their peers.
Incompetence and the Failure of Feedback
One puzzling aspect of our results is how the incompetent fail, through
life experience, to learn that they are unskilled. This is not a new
puzzle. Sullivan, in
1953 , marveled at "the failure of learning which has left their
capacity for fantastic, self-centered delusions so utterly unaffected by a
life-long history of educative events" (p. 80). With that observation in
mind, it is striking that our student participants overestimated their
standing on academically oriented tests as familiar to them as grammar and
logical reasoning. Although our analysis suggests that incompetent
individuals are unable to spot their poor performances themselves, one
would have thought negative feedback would have been inevitable at some
point in their academic career. So why had they not learned?
One reason is that people seldom receive negative feedback about their
skills and abilities from others in everyday life ( Blumberg, 1972
; Darley
& Fazio, 1980 ; Goffman, 1955
; Matlin
& Stang, 1978 ; Tesser &
Rosen, 1975 ). Even young children are familiar with the notion that
"if you do not have something nice to say, don't say anything at all."
Second, the bungled robbery attempt of McArthur Wheeler not withstanding,
some tasks and settings preclude people from receiving self-correcting
information that would reveal the suboptimal nature of their decisions (
Einhorn,
1982 ). Third, even if people receive negative feedback, they still
must come to an accurate understanding of why that failure has occurred.
The problem with failure is that it is subject to more attributional
ambiguity than success. For success to occur, many things must go right:
The person must be skilled, apply effort, and perhaps be a bit lucky. For
failure to occur, the lack of any one of these components is sufficient.
Because of this, even if people receive feedback that points to a lack of
skill, they may attribute it to some other factor ( Snyder,
Higgins, & Stucky, 1983 ; Snyder,
Shenkel, & Lowery, 1977 ).
Finally, Study 3 showed that incompetent individuals may be unable to
take full advantage of one particular kind of feedback: social comparison.
One of the ways people gain insight into their own competence is by
watching the behavior of others ( Festinger, 1954
; Gilbert,
Giesler & Morris, 1995 ). In a perfect world, everyone could see
the judgments and decisions that other people reach, accurately assess how
competent those decisions are, and then revise their view of their own
competence by comparison. However, Study 3 showed that incompetent
individuals are unable to take full advantage of such opportunities.
Compared with their more expert peers, they were less able to spot
competence when they saw it, and as a consequence, were less able to learn
that their ability estimates were incorrect.
Limitations of the Present Analysis
We do not mean to imply that people are always unaware of their
incompetence. We doubt whether many of our readers would dare take on
Michael Jordan in a game of one-on-one, challenge Eric Clapton with a
session of dueling guitars, or enter into a friendly wager on the golf
course with Tiger Woods. Nor do we mean to imply that the metacognitive
failings of the incompetent are the only reason people overestimate their
abilities relative to their peers. We have little doubt that other factors
such as motivational biases ( Alicke, 1985
; Brown,
1986 ; Taylor &
Brown, 1988 ), self-serving trait definitions ( Dunning &
Cohen, 1992 ; Dunning et al.,
1989 ), selective recall of past behavior ( Sanitioso,
Kunda, & Fong, 1990 ), and the tendency to ignore the
proficiencies of others ( Klar, Medding,
& Sarel, 1996 ; Kruger, 1999
) also play a role. Indeed, although bottom-quartile participants
accounted for the bulk of the above-average effects observed in our
studies (overestimating their ability by an average of 50 percentile
points), there was also a slight tendency for the other quartiles to
overestimate themselves (by just over 6 percentile points)–a fact our
metacognitive analysis cannot explain.
When can the incompetent be expected to overestimate themselves because
of their lack of skill? Although our data do not speak to this issue
directly, we believe the answer depends on the domain under consideration.
Some domains, like those examined in this article, are those in which
knowledge about the domain confers competence in the domain. Individuals
with a great understanding of the rules of grammar or inferential logic,
for example, are by definition skilled linguists and logicians. In such
domains, lack of skill implies both the inability to perform competently
as well as the inability to recognize competence, and thus are also the
domains in which the incompetent are likely to be unaware of their lack of
skill.
In other domains, however, competence is not wholly dependent on
knowledge or wisdom, but depends on other factors, such as physical skill.
One need not look far to find individuals with an impressive understanding
of the strategies and techniques of basketball, for instance, yet who
could not "dunk" to save their lives. (These people are called coaches.)
Similarly, art appraisers make a living evaluating fine calligraphy, but
know they do not possess the steady hand and patient nature necessary to
produce the work themselves. In such domains, those in which knowledge
about the domain does not necessarily translate into competence in the
domain, one can become acutely–even painfully–aware of the limits of one's
ability. In golf, for instance, one can know all about the fine points of
course management, club selection, and effective "swing thoughts," but
one's incompetence will become sorely obvious when, after watching one's
more able partner drive the ball 250 yards down the fairway, one proceeds
to hit one's own ball 150 yards down the fairway, 50 yards to the right,
and onto the hood of that 1993 Ford Taurus.
Finally, in order for the incompetent to overestimate themselves, they
must satisfy a minimal threshold of knowledge, theory, or experience that
suggests to themselves that they can generate correct answers. In some
domains, there are clear and unavoidable reality constraints that
prohibits this notion. For example, most people have no trouble
identifying their inability to translate Slovenian proverbs, reconstruct
an 8-cylinder engine, or diagnose acute disseminated encephalomyelitis. In
these domains, without even an intuition of how to respond, people do not
overestimate their ability. Instead, if people show any bias at all, it is
to rate themselves as worse than their peers ( Kruger, 1999
).
Relation to Work on Overconfidence
The finding that people systematically overestimate their ability and
performance calls to mind other work on calibration in which people make a
prediction and estimate the likelihood that the prediction will prove
correct. Consistently, the confidence with which people make their
predictions far exceeds their accuracy rates (e.g., Dunning,
Griffin, Milojkovic, & Ross, 1990 ; Vallone,
Griffin, Lin, & Ross, 1990 ; Lichtenstein,
Fischhoff, & Phillips, 1982 ).
Our data both complement and extend this work. In particular, work on
overconfidence has shown that people are more miscalibrated when they face
difficult tasks, ones for which they fail to possess the requisite
knowledge, than they are for easy tasks, ones for which they do possess
that knowledge ( Lichtenstein
& Fischhoff, 1977 ). Our work replicates this point not by looking
at properties of the task but at properties of the person. Whether the
task is difficult because of the nature of the task or because the person
is unskilled, the end result is a large degree of overconfidence.
Our data also provide an empirical rebuttal to a critique that has been
leveled at past work on overconfidence. Gigerenzer
(1991) and his colleagues ( Gigerenzer,
Hoffrage, & Kleinbölting, 1991 ) have argued that the types of
probability estimates used in traditional overconfidence work–namely,
those concerning the occurrence of single events–are fundamentally flawed.
According to the critique, probabilities do not apply to single events but
only to multiple ones. As a consequence, if people make probability
estimates in more appropriate contexts (such as by estimating the total
number of test items answered correctly), "cognitive illusions" such as
overconfidence disappear. Our results call this critique into question.
Across the three studies in which we have relevant data, participants
consistently overestimated the number of items they had answered
correctly, Z = 4.94, p < .0001.