Ethan Zell

Who they are

Zell is listed on the University of North Carolina Greensboro employee directory as a member of its psychology faculty, as checked in October 2026. His published work cited here sits in the research area that asks how closely a person's view of themselves matches measurable reality. Two papers define that work on this site. The first, with Zlatan Krizan, asks how well self-evaluations of ability track objective performance. The second, with Jeremy Strickhouser, Constantine Sedikides and Mark Alicke, asks how often and how strongly people rate themselves above the average person.

Those two questions bear on the Dunning-Kruger effect from different sides. The first concerns the overall link between what people say about their ability and how they perform. The second concerns the habit of placing oneself above the typical person, which is one of the two statistical accounts that researchers have offered for part of the Dunning-Kruger pattern.

Key papers

Zell, E., & Krizan, Z. (2014). Do people have insight into their abilities? A metasynthesis. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 9(2), 111-125. doi:10.1177/1745691613518075.

Zell, E., Strickhouser, J. E., Sedikides, C., & Alicke, M. D. (2020). The better-than-average effect in comparative self-evaluation: A comprehensive review and meta-analysis. Psychological Bulletin, 146(2), 118-149. doi:10.1037/bul0000218.

Key ideas

The 2014 metasynthesis gathered 22 meta-analyses that compared self-evaluations of ability with objective measures of performance. The domains were academic ability, intelligence, language competence, medical skills, sports ability and vocational skills, and performance was measured by standardised tests, grades and supervisor evaluations. The individual correlations ran from .09 to .63, with a mean of .29. The authors described this as moderate insight into one's own abilities. The link was stronger for domain-specific self-evaluations and for tasks that were objective, familiar or low in complexity.

The 2020 meta-analysis reviewed the better-than-average effect, the tendency to rate one's own abilities and traits as better than those of an average peer. It drew on 124 published articles, 291 independent samples and more than 950,000 participants, and it reported an overall effect of dz = 0.78. The authors found the effect larger for personality traits than for abilities, larger for positive than for negative dimensions, and larger when the direct rather than the indirect method of measurement was used. It was also larger in European American samples than in East Asian samples, especially for individualistic traits. They reported little evidence of publication bias overall, and associations of the effect with self-esteem (r = .34) and life satisfaction (r = .33).

Read together, the two papers describe self-assessment as informative but imperfect. People's ratings of their own ability correlate with performance to a moderate degree, and when they compare themselves with others, they lean above the middle. On this site, the 2014 figures are used in the article on the Dunning-Kruger effect to show where self-ratings of ability sit across many fields, including vocational skills judged by supervisors.

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