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Projects
How Level of Skill Contributes to Error in Self-Judgments
I have explored how actual skill
level influences people’s
ability to judge the quality of their performance. In order to know whether
one is performing well, one has to know what a good performance looks like.
This can be quite easy for physical tasks. To compare one’s swimming
performance to that of another, one need merely determine which time is
faster. This becomes a more difficult proposition for intellectual tasks.
In order to know whether one has answered test questions correctly, one
needs to know the correct answer. Thus, those who lack skill in intellectual
tasks suffer from a dual burden. They suffer from the lack of skill but
they also lack the knowledge necessary to recognize their lack of skill.
I have shown that poor students, poor drivers, and gun owners who lack
basic gun knowledge fail to recognize this deficit, even in the presence
of strong incentives to do so (Ehrlinger, Johnson, Banner, Dunning, & Kruger,
2005). My current and future research explores self-judgments among the
highly skilled. Those who possess great skill are uniquely aware not only
of what they do know but also of what they do not yet know. This awareness
can lead to underconfidence.
How Biased Allocation of Attention Contributes to Error in Self-Judgments
I have also explored behaviors that lead judgments of task performance
astray. One reason for error in self-judgment might be that accuracy is
not necessarily an individual’s only, or even primary, goal. Whereas
some individuals may value accuracy because of its greater utility for
learning, others might value maintaining a positive view of the self, even
if that view is not accurate. Goals to preserve positive views of the self
are likely to inspire a series of behaviors that promote overconfidence
in self-judgments. To explore the relationship between goals and accuracy
in self-judgment, I turned to literature on a factor that underlies and,
thus, strongly predicts an individual’s goals in achievement situations — the
degree to which people believe that their intelligence is changeable as
opposed to fixed and immutable. In this ongoing line of research, I capitalize
on people’s theories about their intelligence to identify and explore
a number of behaviors that contribute to error in self-judgment. For example, I have used implicit theories as a tool to explore the
relationship between allocation of attention and self-judgment. People
who believe that intelligence is changeable (incremental theorists) are
motivated to learn and to accurately assess their performance. As such,
I expected them to pay attention to all aspects of a task and provide
relatively accurate judgments of their performance. In contrast, those
who believe intelligence to be fixed (entity theorists) are motivated
to look and feel smart, and thus will gravitate towards tasks that allow
them to perform well while avoiding the potential for failure. As such,
I expected them to pay greater attention to aspects of a task that suggest
they are succeeding and less attention to task aspects that suggest failure.
This biased pattern of attention allocation should leave entity theorists
with better memory for successful than unsuccessful aspects of a task
and, consequently, overconfident judgments about their performance.
My research reveals that beliefs about the degree to which intelligence
is changeable strongly predict accuracy in self-judgments (Ehrlinger & Dweck,
2005). Indeed, those who think intelligence is fixed account for most
of the overconfidence effect on a variety of tasks. I find further that
theories of intelligence strongly predict the way people allocate their
attention, as measured by time spent on different task aspects. Incremental
theorists, motivated by a goal to learn, allocate attention to hard and
easy aspects of the task. As a result, they make relatively accurate
judgments about the quality of their performance. Entity theorists, in
contrast, focus primarily on easy aspects of the task, giving little
attention to difficult aspects. As a result, they make overconfident
judgments of their performance. Additional evidence for the relation
between attention and self-judgment comes from a study in which I directed
entity theorists’ attention towards difficult aspects of the task
by requiring them to retype and proofread difficult questions. This manipulation
resulted in a drop in entity theorists’ confidence and judgments
of performance that were as accurate as those offered by their incremental
theorist peers. Further, I find that by teaching individuals the view
that intelligence is a changeable trait, we can lead them to allocate
their attention to both easy and difficult aspects of a task and, consequently,
to make more accurate judgments of performance
How Strategies for Assessing Bias Introduce Error into Self-Judgments
My fascination with the difficult task of knowing oneself well is based,
in part, on the surprising level of confidence individuals hold in their
self-views. This fascination leads naturally to an interest in a related
question — do individuals recognize when their judgment might be
clouded? One might think that holding a “vested interest” in
an issue is the sort of bias that one cannot deny. However, I have shown
that people believe their own connection to an issue to be a source of
enlightenment, but the connection of others to be a source of bias (Ehrlinger,
Gilovich, & Ross, 2005). For example, Jewish participants thought
their own views were less influenced by personal connection to the issue
of violence in the Middle East than the views of Muslim and Arab participants.
Muslim and Arab participants, in contrast, judged their own connection
to the issue to be a source of enlightened information, but the personal
connection held by Jewish participants to be a source of bias. In this
way, a personal stake is only seen as a source of bias when it is held
by others, allowing individuals to believe that their own judgments are
objective. |
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