Zlatan Krizan

Who they are

Krizan is listed as a professor in the Department of Psychology at Iowa State University on the university's pages, as checked in October 2026. The university lists his areas of expertise as personality and social behaviour, including self-regulation, sleep and social emotions. His appearance on this site rests on a single paper, the 2014 metasynthesis written with Zell, so this page covers that paper and its use here.

The paper belongs to the research on self-knowledge: how closely people's views of their own abilities match what can be measured. It gathered meta-analyses from six areas, academic ability, intelligence, language competence, medical skills, sports ability and vocational skills, so that one figure could describe the relation across many fields instead of a single task.

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.

Key ideas

The metasynthesis compared self-evaluations of ability with objective performance, measured by standardised tests, grades and supervisor evaluations. Across 22 meta-analyses the individual correlations ranged from .09 to .63, with a mean of .29. The authors described this as moderate insight into one's own abilities.

They also reported which conditions strengthened the relation. It was stronger when the self-evaluation was specific to a domain rather than general, and when the performance task was objective, familiar or low in complexity.

On this site the figures sit in the article on the Dunning-Kruger effect. The original Dunning-Kruger studies used short tests taken by students. The metasynthesis adds the wider picture of how self-ratings and results relate across many fields, including vocational skills judged by supervisors. Applying that picture to workplace self-ratings, such as those in an appraisal, is an inference made in that article. The 2014 paper reported the correlations.

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