Saturday, September 27, 2008
Again, no links or footnotes. I forget where I read about this study, it's been bumping around in my head for a while, but I'm sure anyone interested could find it. I may have some details wrong, but this is pretty much the basics.
Researchers gave a bunch of random people an LSAT practice test (which is basically a combination aptitude/IQ test). After the test, they asked the testees to estimate how well they thought they did.
Almost everyone overestimated their performance.
The people who scored best on the test estimated closest to their actual scores, and were most likely to have underestimated.
Average scorers, those in the middle, overestimated a bit more than the high scorers, but generally they overestimated by pretty much the same amount. In other words, they were average overestimators, too. The closer they were to an average score, the closer their overestimation was to the average overestimation.
The people who scored the lowest overestimated the most. After having taken the test, most of them were convinced they'd done a good job on it. Even after having been shown the answers of the high scorers, and been told that this is how the high scorers answered, they STILL were confident that they'd done well, too.
Odd.
The researchers' theory is that the less capable we are in a job, the more confident we are that we do it well. The less capable we are of making a decision, the more confident we are of that decision.
Not so odd. We've seen a lot of that in the White House.
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