Unskilled and Unaware of It

cvillehog · Post by **cvillehog** » Fri Jul 08, 2005 4:22 pm

This is a very interesting article I saw linked on a blog today.

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing
One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments
Justin Kruger and David Dunning
Department of Psychology
Cornell University

Gibbs' Hog · Post by **Gibbs' Hog** » Fri Jul 08, 2005 4:37 pm

Nice.

I think the following predictions can be used to accurately portray a few people here that like to do nothing but throw criticism at everything.

Prediction 1. Incompetent individuals, compared with their more competent peers, will dramatically overestimate their ability and performance relative to objective criteria.

Prediction 2. Incompetent individuals will suffer from deficient metacognitive skills, in that they will be less able than their more competent peers to recognize competence when they see it–be it their own or anyone else's.

Prediction 3. Incompetent individuals will be less able than their more competent peers to gain insight into their true level of performance by means of social comparison information. In particular, because of their difficulty recognizing competence in others, incompetent individuals will be unable to use information about the choices and performances of others to form more accurate impressions of their own ability.

Prediction 4. The incompetent can gain insight about their shortcomings, but this comes (paradoxically) by making them more competent, thus providing them the metacognitive skills necessary to be able to realize that they have performed poorly.

Gibbs' Hog · Post by **Gibbs' Hog** » Fri Jul 08, 2005 4:42 pm

This was interesting too...

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 ).

What's that old saying about 'not feeding the trolls?' Maybe we should revise our strategy. After all, they will not be able to recognize their own incompetence unless we point it out to them...

General Failure · Post by **General Failure** » Sat Jul 09, 2005 3:33 am

Trolls are successful only when replied to. Pointing out that they're unsuccessful is counter-productive. If not counter-productive, at least some sort of paradox.

1niksder · Post by **1niksder** » Sat Jul 09, 2005 1:12 pm

Trolls are unsuccessful only not when replied to. Pointing out that they're successful is productive. If not it's some sort of paradox, at least counter-productive.

General Failure · Post by **General Failure** » Sat Jul 09, 2005 10:10 pm

I'm tellin' BH you were posting while drunk.

cvillehog · Post by **cvillehog** » Sat Jul 09, 2005 10:17 pm

Are you guys doing the repeater?

1niksder · Post by **1niksder** » Sun Jul 10, 2005 12:53 pm

General Failure wrote:I'm tellin' BH you were posting while drunk.

Drunk

Never

I'd go with inebriated

But come to thing of it win reading what a troll has posted I get the impression