uumlau
Happy Dancer
- Joined
- Feb 9, 2010
- Messages
- 5,517
- MBTI Type
- INTJ
- Enneagram
- 953
- Instinctual Variant
- sp/so
I understand this part, the bolded. The underlined doesn't quite make sense to me. Above average would mean good. The way I see you meaning it is that they are above average to the bad, but below average to the good... this would mean that they deem themselves average and not incompotent, which goes against the test results. This reasoning also covers the unaltered text. This is a weird test anyway. So many fallacies.
Agreed. The conclusion "sounds deep," but really isn't.
The essence of what I mean is, when asked to evaluate one's own skill level, with respect to something that is an extremely common skill, such as reading, math, grammar, driving, and so on, the tendency is to estimate one's own skill as "pretty good, but not great". I know how to drive a car, I'm way better at driving a car now than when I was a kid, but I know I'm not a professional driver. So I don't evaluate myself as a bad driver, even if I am. I don't evaluate myself as a great driver, even if I am. I have no basis for comparison w/r to my skill as a driver, so I simply conclude "good, better than average, maybe, but not great." I would conclude this whether I am extremely good or extremely bad or truly average. So even if I am having near accidents all the time, I judge my skill as pretty good since I manage to avoid hitting anyone. Even if my habits are so good that I rarely have a close call, I have no way of realizing how unusually good my good habits are.
Given that hypothesis as the base phenomenon, I think that other conclusions are a bit far-fetched. There is a tendency to conclude that it is overconfidence that causes the incompetence, or the concern over one's adequacy causes one to try harder and thus be more competent. This might indeed be happening on an individual basis, but I see no way to separate out such effects from the base selection effect that people will tend to regard themselves as "somewhat above average drivers."
This totally breaks down for skills like physics knowledge. Most people are well aware of how ignorant they are of physics, and those who have a Ph.D. in physics are well aware that they are experts in the subject. The phenomenon is limited to very common skills that everyone has to some degree or another, for which there is very little communal feedback of one's skill. E.g., cooking is a common skill, but one is usually very aware of how bad or good one is at it, due to feedback from others and trying others' cooking.