Having inaccurate
self-insights
has serious consequences
Newswise — Dozens of studies agree: Most
people overrate their own abilities. This tendency can have severe
consequences: young adults making poor decisions about college and
careers, pilots flying into storms and overconfident doctors making
erroneous diagnoses.
According to a Cornell University
expert on self-insight who has published two studies on the topic as
well as a new book, "Over a lifetime, people base thousands of
decisions on impressions of their skill, knowledge, expertise,
talent, personality and moral character." However, says David
Dunning, professor of social psychology at Cornell, "People's
capacity to evaluate themselves and predict their behavior is
usually quite modest and often much more meager than common
intuition would lead one to believe."
Dunning has conducted dozens of
studies showing that people often hold overinflated views of their
expertise and character. His latest study in the most recent issue
of Psychological Science in the Public Interest (Vol. 5:3) shows
that this psychological phenomenon can have far-reaching
implications in health, education and the workplace. His co-authors
are Chip Heath of Stanford University and Jerry Suls of the
University of Iowa.
"People tend to believe their
personal risk of becoming ill from food poisoning, SARS or HIV, for
example, is lower than other peoples' risks. Students consistently
think they've done better on exams than they really have, and
surgical residents think they can perform procedures much better
than their supervisors think the residents can," said Dunning.
"Likewise, from the office cubicle to the executive boardroom,
people tend to hold overly inflated self-views that are only
modestly related to actual performance. Often, other people --
subordinates, peers and superiors -- can make much better judgments
about others than themselves."
To get a better handle on why
people's self-perceptions are so inaccurate, Dunning and former
graduate student Deanna Caputo, Ph.D. '04, who now works at BAE
Systems in Virginia, conducted a series of five studies suggesting
that people overrate their skills, in part, not because of inflated
egos but because they have little or no insight into a specific
class of errors they make -- their errors of omission. Participants
in the studies rated themselves on how well they did on word games,
visual puzzles, grammar tasks and evaluations of research
methodologies. In a variation, volunteers were informed about the
solutions they had missed and then asked to rate their performance
again.
Dunning and Caputo found that
although participants were perfectly aware of solutions they had
generated in the tasks they confronted, they were completely unable
to predict how many additional solutions they had missed. Not
surprisingly, when asked to evaluate themselves, participants'
self-evaluations gave these errors of omission no weight.
Self-evaluations changed, however, when participants' errors of
omission were pointed out to them. "We found that when participants
were given explicit information about their errors of omission, they
gave those errors as much weight as they did to the solutions they
found," said Dunning.
In another article, he and
Caputo conclude in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
(September 2005; available online at
http://www.sciencedirect.com) that
people are poor self-evaluators, in part, because they have no
awareness of gaps in their knowledge or of the range of solutions
they could apply to problems but do not. In short, although people
know what they know, they are unaware of the universe of what they
do not know.
"It's banal in one sense but
completely profound in another. We don't know what we do not know.
Thus, we do not have all the information we need to make accurate
self-judgments. And it's not a surprise that it's hard to know
yourself, because you never have all the information you need to do
so, and people are often not aware of that fact," said Dunning.
"This may seem self-evident, but it's not an insight people realize
on a day-to-day basis.
"You have to worry about the stuff
you don't realize you don't know. It's these unknown unknowns that
keep NASA officials up at night. It is what you are unaware of that
you really have to find out."
What all the studies show, he
said, is that people need to be more cautious about what they know
and do not know about themselves and should try to adjust their
self-views and predictions accordingly.
The studies were supported, in
part, by the National Institute of Mental Health.
Dunning's new book
Dunning has published a new book
on the topic, "Self-Insight: Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to
Knowing Thyself" (Psychology Press: 2005). It details the scientific
evidence for the inaccuracies of the impressions people hold of
themselves and why it is surprisingly difficult to form accurate
impressions of self.
"Even with all the time we spend
with ourselves and all the motivation to achieve accurate
self-understanding, we reach flawed and sometimes downright wrong
conclusions about ourselves," Dunning writes in the book.
The book explores:
* Why people are such poor judges
of their competencies and skills in social and intellectual areas;
* How people develop their
self-perceptions of skill and accuracy, if not from performance;
* Why life experiences and
feedback don't always help people develop more accurate impressions
of self;
* Why people believe they are more
unique and special than they really area;
* Why people so often believe they
are ethically superior to others;
* Why mistaken predictions of self
may sometimes have nothing to do with faulty self-knowledge, but
rather be more of a function of misunderstanding the situations we
put ourselves in.
"Achieving accurate self-judgment
is inherently difficult, and many question whether accurate
self-evaluations are even possible," Dunning said. "Nevertheless,
there are tools that people do have at their disposal to evaluate
themselves, but they tend to ignore them."
These include paying close
attention to past outcomes, looking to others as a crucial source of
information about oneself and paying close attention to how others
do the things that you want to do better. "Using your peers as
mentors can be very useful because everybody has a different set of
competencies," Dunning said.