One thing about Dunning-Kruger that I've never heard mentioned is self-esteem affecting one's answer. As in, if you explicitly mark a low score for yourself you're both divulging to others and admitting to yourself that you think you're a failure in that category. So imagine you're presented with one of these forms... what incentive/preventative is given to not let your ego's self-preservation instincts kick in and put you down as "average" (50%+) for anything and everything?
Basically, I can't imagine how you'd account for the societal matter of bravado and I posit that it has an influence on the outcome of DK experiments. e.g. if you tried to account subvert bravado and had some kind of reward at the end to say "Hey, if you successfully guess your percentile for a given skill we'll give you a cookie." (which of course would incentivize you to put "0%" and intentionally bomb the test.)
They didn't ask people for their evaluations before the test; they asked after the test, and after it had been scored, to see where people thought their score ranked relative to the rest of the people who had taken the test.
So, people already knew how many things they had gotten right and wrong when making their judgement. They just judged that most other people had also gotten a similar number wrong.
Congrats you've discovered the other half of the Dunning Krueger effect. The smartest people in the test will assume others might know more than them, because they know enough to know they aren't experts.
It doesn't matter what causes the wrong estimate. It's still someone with a lack of ability presenting himself as if he has ability, which he will also do, for the same reasons. when more is at stake.
Maybe you could ask participants to rank their proficiencies in a collection of skills. Then they could be tested on some or all of those skills to see if their ranking is correct.
What I think is most interesting about D-K is how it is referred to as universal, as an aspect of human psychology in general, but in fact the original studies were done in America on American college students and give quite different results when repeated in other cultures.
Ah, actually, no, not beyond the one dismissed in TFA.
I'd have to modify my previous post, then: "What I think is most interesting about D-K is how it is referred to as universal, as an aspect of human psychology in general, but in fact the original studies were done in America on American college students".
As far as I can tell, TFA does not seem claim that there isn't a cultural dimension to D-K, just that we don't know what it is because no studies are cited. I would still say that it doubtful that the studies on Cornell students generalize to the entire population of the world when it comes to these things...
I can't even process what you're saying. What culture doesn't acknowledge self respect, and one's place in society relative to others?
Certainly there are small communities everywhere (even in America -- after all, they were prolific in America's infancy) that sought the creation of a hyper-communal and idyllic towns... but... those never scale because, well, people are selfish. But still. I just can't process what you're saying. Maybe I'm blinded by offense.
But we're talking about self-esteem, which everyone is supposed to get for free. Self-respect, like the respect of others, must be earned. Equating the two is a quintessentially modern-American mistake (I'm a modern American, and I made this mistake myself for years), and I think that's what 'sklogic calls out above.
> What culture doesn't acknowledge self respect, and one's place in society relative to others?
What culture (besides the Northern Americans) would so blindly equate self respect to self esteem? The others understand better that you can respect yourself even without the overblown, unrealistic views on your own abilities and virtues.
>>Do not forget that this very "self esteem" thingy is almost exclusively American. The other nations do not even think in such terms.
This over inflated sense of importance or "self esteem thingy" may be exclusively American but not anywhere close to all Americans subscribe to it. There are 330+ million people of various ages and backgrounds living in the US. I don't see how painting with such a broad brush like you have been does anything but inflame debate.
My question is this though, as much as people like bandying DK around, has it not been replicated? Specific to you, has the effect not been tested anywhere outside North America?
You're saying Americans are the only people in the world who care about themselves? Other countries are full of purely rational actors who attach no emotional value to their own abilities? Have you ever met a real person outside of America?
Ok, only Americans have over-inflated self esteem, that's a different statement. Still wrong, but at least it's a common stereotype.
And I don't think that study supports your comment at all.
> Supporting this contention, our Chinese participants reported liking themselves every bit as much as our European American participants.
> This finding supports our claim that cultural differences in self-esteem arise from cultural differences in self-evaluations, with people from East Asian countries evaluating themselves less positively than people from Western countries.
> Thus, even though cognitive self-evaluations are lower in China than in America, they are not less predictive of global self-esteem. This finding suggests that global self-esteem is experienced similarly across dissimilar cultures
This study finds that self esteem is equally prevalent across the two cultures, and as far as I can see says nothing about how much the participants value their self esteem.
Fine, I would be interested to see evidence of that if you have any. The study you linked was not related, and that doesn't match up with my own experiences with non-American.
Do you have a quote that describes that, because that's not what I saw at all. The basic summary is that while Chinese people tend to evaluate their skills more modestly than Americans, their emotional self esteem is just as high. I didn't see anything analyzing how they value their self esteem, or how it affects their behavior.
Basically, I can't imagine how you'd account for the societal matter of bravado and I posit that it has an influence on the outcome of DK experiments. e.g. if you tried to account subvert bravado and had some kind of reward at the end to say "Hey, if you successfully guess your percentile for a given skill we'll give you a cookie." (which of course would incentivize you to put "0%" and intentionally bomb the test.)