Overconfidence —> Incompetence; Humility —> Success

A recent NYTimes article highlights the work of Cornell psychologist David Dunning and his grad student Justin Kruger on the critical relationship between self-assessment and skill level. Not surprisingly, they've shown that people with poor skills are also quite bad at assessing their own abilities. They tend to be grossly overconfident, demonstrating a notable deficiency in "self-monitoring skills." The opposite is also true: better performers have far more humble predictions, and subsequently more accurate assessments, of their performances. (Thanks to Sam Koritz for his recent post on this.)

That research connects nicely with a study by Dianne Horgan, from Memphis State University, showing that the success of child chess players correlates closely with their "calibration" skills -- the accuracy with which they can predict their own performance. Further, she showed that experienced child chess players can export their higher calibration skills to other, non-chess tasks.

None of this is shocking, but it strikes me as a central point in the aspiration for greatness. It certainly resonates with my own experience and observation: to get better and better at something, one needs to be one's own toughest critic -- fair, but always honest, humble and tough. You don't want to be demoralizing, needlessly tearing at the fabric of your self-esteem, but at every turn, you do want to be saying: "Well, that's not quite good enough -- I can do better." In fact, it seems to me that you want to attach self-esteem to the process of becoming better, instead of letting it become attached to any static result. That way, you can be critical of a performance and not become demoralized about what it says about you as a person. The self-criticism actually becomes a self-esteem booster because you feel good about doing the hard work to constantly improve.

 

Comments

[Becky]

That explains American Idol.

[Jane Shevtsov]

Calibration is definitely important, but I wonder about the self-selection effect in some of these studies. If you think you're really bad at, say, logic, will you sign up for a study that involves measuring logic skills? We might not be seeing the low competence/low self-evaluation folks.

And these folks are most definitely out there. I know I've mentioned John Mighton before, but this time I can give some links to info about his methods of teaching math to very low performing kids, which relies heavily on teaching step-by-step procedures (at least at the outset) and building self-confidence. A quote from one of the articles:

"Mighton's first student was a 15-year old boy. "His teacher had told him he was the stupidest kid he ever saw. Having struggled with math myself, I decided to reserve judgment. I worked with him for five years and he turned out to be an ideal student. He's now doing his doctoral work in math at the University of Toronto." "

Presentation by Mighton and Brian Greene, along with article: http://www.nyas.org/publications/readersReport.asp?articleID=19
PDF of chapter of Mighton's book: http://www.nyas.org/pdfs/rw19.pdf
Article from the Globe & Mail: http://evalu8.org/staticpage?page=review&siteid=2253

[Kris]

It's interesting that you mention this, because I've been doing a lot of my own reading on giftedness lately and I keep coming across what seems to be the opposite--something called "Imposter Syndrome." Basically, a lot gifted individuals tend to feel like they've been extraordinarily lucky instead of actually intelligent, or that they've somehow been tricking everyone into believing they're smart instead of accepting their achievements for what they are. It's apparently much more common in gifted women than in men.

I don't know if you've come across it yet or if it's of any interest, but here are a few links:
http://fecolumnists.expressindia.com/full_column.php?content_id=32033
http://www.talentdevelop.com/articles/Page19.html
http://www.talentdevelop.com/articles/Page1.html
http://www.impostorsyndrome.com/

[Sol]

I think the subject line does this post a disservice. At least, the description of the research (and my own experience in these sorts of things) suggests to me that while overconfidence may help maintain your incompetence, it was probably the incompetence that helped create the overconfidence in the first place. And while it's not quite so clearcut with humility and success, I think they are similarly blended.

My personal example: as a classically-trained musician tackling Irish traditional music a few years back, I rapidly became very good at everything like classical music in Irish music (reading notation, playing quickly, etc) while completely missing everything in the music that could not be represented in music notation -- which is to say, I missed almost everything important in the genre. And since I didn't realize I was missing it, my confidence far outpaced my actual skill for years. (And maybe it still does -- but now I'm acutely aware that I still have a lot to learn before I can truly claim even a basic competence.)