Research from numerous corners of psychological inquiry suggests that self-assessments of skill and character are often flawed in substantive and systematic ways. We review empirical findings on the imperfect nature of self-assessment and discuss implications for three real-world domains: health, education, and the workplace. In general, people's self-views hold only a tenuous to modest relationship with their actual behavior and performance. The correlation between self-ratings of skill and actual performance in many domains is moderate to meager-indeed, at times, other people's predictions of a person's outcomes prove more accurate than that person's self-predictions. In addition, people overrate themselves. On average, people say that they are "above average" in skill (a conclusion that defies statistical possibility), overestimate the likelihood that they will engage in desirable behaviors and achieve favorable outcomes, furnish overly optimistic estimates of when they will complete future projects, and reach judgments with too much confidence. Several psychological processes conspire to produce flawed self-assessments. Research focusing on health echoes these findings. People are unrealistically optimistic about their own health risks compared with those of other people. They also overestimate how distinctive their opinions and preferences (e.g., discomfort with alcohol) are among their peers-a misperception that can have a deleterious impact on their health. Unable to anticipate how they would respond to emotion-laden situations, they mispredict the preferences of patients when asked to step in and make treatment decisions for them. Guided by mistaken but seemingly plausible theories of health and disease, people misdiagnose themselves-a phenomenon that can have severe consequences for their health and longevity. Similarly, research in education finds that students' assessments of their performance tend to agree only moderately with those of their teachers and mentors. Students seem largely unable to assess how well or poorly they have comprehended material they have just read. They also tend to be overconfident in newly learned skills, at times because the common educational practice of massed training appears to promote rapid acquisition of skill-as well as self-confidence-but not necessarily the retention of skill. Several interventions, however, can be introduced to prompt students to evaluate their skill and learning more accurately. In the workplace, flawed self-assessments arise all the way up the corporate ladder. Employees tend to overestimate their skill, making it difficult to give meaningful feedback. CEOs also display overconfidence in their judgments, particularly when stepping into new markets or novel projects-for example, proposing acquisitions that hurt, rather then help, the price of their company's stock. We discuss several interventions aimed at circumventing the consequences of such flawed assessments; these include training people to routinely make cognitive repairs correcting for biased self-assessments and requiring people to justify their decisions in front of their peers. The act of self-assessment is an intrinsically difficult task, and we enumerate several obstacles that prevent people from reaching truthful self-impressions. We also propose that researchers and practitioners should recognize self-assessment as a coherent and unified area of study spanning many subdisciplines of psychology and beyond. Finally, we suggest that policymakers and other people who makes real-world assessments should be wary of self-assessments of skill, expertise, and knowledge, and should consider ways of repairing self-assessments that may be flawed.

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/j.1529-1006.2004.00018.x

Flawed Self-Assessment Implications for Health, Education, and the Workplace

Politeness: some universals in language usage

Advantages and disadvantages of Web and lab research are reviewed. Via the World Wide Web, one can efficiently recruit large, heterogeneous samples quickly, recruit specialized samples (people with rare characteristics), and standardize procedures, making studies easy to replicate. Alternative programming techniques (procedures for data collection) are compared, including client-side as opposed to server-side programming. Web studies have methodological problems; for example, higher rates of drop out and of repeated participation. Web studies must be thoroughly analyzed and tested before launching on-line. Many studies compared data obtained in Web versus lab. These two methods usually reach the same conclusions; however, there are significant differences between college students tested in the lab and people recruited and tested via the Internet. Reasons that Web researchers are enthusiastic about the potential of the new methods are discussed.

Human research and data collection via the internet.

There has been perennial interest in personal qualities other than cognitive ability that determine success, including self-control, grit, growth mindset, and many others. Attempts to measure such qualities for the purposes of educational policy and practice, however, are more recent. In this article, we identify serious challenges to doing so. We first address confusion over terminology, including the descriptor "non-cognitive." We conclude that debate over the optimal name for this broad category of personal qualities obscures substantial agreement about the specific attributes worth measuring. Next, we discuss advantages and limitations of different measures. In particular, we compare self-report questionnaires, teacher-report questionnaires, and performance tasks, using self-control as an illustrative case study to make the general point that each approach is imperfect in its own way. Finally, we discuss how each measure's imperfections can affect its suitability for program evaluation, accountability, individual diagnosis, and practice improvement. For example, we do not believe any available measure is suitable for between-school accountability judgments. In addition to urging caution among policymakers and practitioners, we highlight medium-term innovations that may make measures of these personal qualities more suitable for educational purposes.

Measurement Matters: Assessing Personal Qualities Other Than Cognitive Ability for Educational Purposes

To what extent do moral judgments depend on conscious reasoning from explicitly understood principles? We address this question by investigating one particular moral principle, the principle of the double effect. Using web-based technology, we collected a large data set on individuals ' responses to a series of moral dilemmas, asking when harm to innocent others is permissible. Each moral dilemma presented a choice between action and inaction, both resulting in lives saved and lives lost. Results showed that: (1) patterns of moral judgments were consistent with the principle of double effect and showed little variation across differences in gender, age, educational level, ethnicity, religion or national affi liation (within the limited range of our sample population) and (2) a majority of subjects failed to provide justifi cations that could account for their judgments. These results indicate that the principle of the double effect may be operative in our moral judgments but not open to conscious introspection. We discuss these results in light of current psychological theories of moral cognition, emphasizing the need to consider the unconscious appraisal system that mentally represents the causal and intentional properties of human action.

/pdf/a-dissociation-between-moral-judgments-and-justifications-482u6yegvk.pdf

A Dissociation Between Moral Judgments and Justifications

We review the classic studies on social influence and the fundamental attribution error to determine (a) whether it is true that behavior of the sort observed in those studies is externally caused in the two senses of external causality used by attribution theorists, (b) whether laypeople have been shown to overestimate the extent to which behavior is internally caused in either of those two senses, and (c) whether there is a better way to characterize the errors people make. We conclude that (a) behavior in those studies has not been shown to be externally caused in the two senses used by attribution theorists, (b) people have not been shown to overestimate the extent to which behavior is internally caused in either of those two senses, (c) there is a different sense of internal versus external causality that better characterizes the errors people make, and (d) these literatures taken together suggest that Americans are far more disposed to preserve face and avoid embarrassment than most people had suspe...

/pdf/the-really-fundamental-attribution-error-in-social-19bi6c6jkx.pdf

The Really Fundamental Attribution Error in Social Psychological Research

Publisher Summary This chapter focuses on the techniques and procedures that are used for putting questionnaires on the Web, with particular emphasis on the technical details. Interactive questioning can be programmed so that it can be described clearly and replicated. In this regard, the method is similar to computer-assisted telephone interviewing, but it is much less expensive. Included here are error checking, challenges to past responses, and use of practice trials with feedback about them. It is easier to make sure that subjects answer all the questions, give answers in the appropriate range, and meet minimal conditions on ordering. Also, Web questionnaires make it much easier to have students to collect and analyze data, as a teaching exercise. However, server-side programs must be carefully written in order not to make the server vulnerable to break-ins, so it is best to consult your local system administrator for advice about which program to use.

Techniques for Creating and Using Web Questionnaires in Research and Teaching

In 3 studies, we asked participants to report on their own emotional experience in specific scenarios, and to predict how others would respond. In line with speculation in the literature, in Study 1 we found underestimation of the percentage of others who would experience embarrassment. We also found truly false consensus effects. In Study 2 we asked participants to report on their experiences of inhibition due to embarrassment, and we found underestimation of how commonly others had been inhibited. We found evidence of a false consensus effect but no evidence of a truly false consensus effect. In Study 3, we found that participants underestimated the probability of other people experiencing anger, fear, guilt, jealousy, joy, and shame. We again found truly false consensus effects. Our results support the idea that pluralistic ignorance may be caused by underestimation of how inhibited other people are by embarrassment.

Underestimates and Truly False Consensus Effects in Estimates of Embarrassment and Other Emotions

First the mea culpas. Hogan (this issue) rightly claims that we claim that the notion of dispositions as employed by attribution theorists cannot do all that the idea is needed to do. But, he claims, we gave the idea of situations a free ride. Mea culpa. He is quite right. (Funder [this issue], too, takes us to task about this.) For example, Gilbert and Malone (1995) treated the “situation” member of the disposition–situation couple as everything on the outside of the epidermis. Will that do? Let’s take a lecture hall with a class in it. Is this the same situation for the lecturer and for the students? Is it the same situation for the student there to learn the material and for the one there to flirt with a neighboring student? What about for the painters waiting to get in to paint the ceiling? What about for the person in the booth trying to get the slides to run in synchrony with the lecture? What about for the person from another culture who has no idea what is going on? The point is that any description of the situation that has any hope of explaining behavior at all will have to make reference to the goals, abilities, and beliefs of the various people in the physical location. A Skinnerian description of the situation from which all such psychological material has been bleached is not likely to predict anything at all.

/pdf/authors-response-authors-response-to-commentaries-2z5eirt3jd.pdf

AUTHORS' RESPONSE Authors' Response to Commentaries

We investigated some types of triggers of embarrassment and their personality correlates. A total of 161 undergraduates indicated how embarrassed they would be in a variety of situations classified a priori into three types. The types were based on the kind of trigger they embodied and were derived in part from current theories of embarrassment. Several analytic techniques, including factor analysis, suggested that there are at least three sorts of situations people find embarrassing: committing a faux pas, being the centre of attention, and threatening another's social identity. We created a subscale for each subtype of trigger. Embarrassibility on each subscale was correlated with embarrassibility on the others, but the reliabilities of the subscales substantially exceeded their intercorrelations. Some personality variables, for example, Neuroticism (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1975) correlated with all subscales, whereas other personality variables correlated differentially, for example, Revised Self-Monitoring...

Who is Embarrassed by What

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