Skilled or unskilled, but still unaware of it: How perceptions of difficulty drive miscalibration in relative comparisons.
Burson, Larrick and Klayman ask whether the pattern reported by Kruger and Dunning, in which unskilled performers lack insight into their relative standing, holds across tasks. Across twelve tasks in three studies they find that it does not hold generally: on moderately difficult tasks the best and worst performers differed little in the accuracy of their judgements, and on harder tasks the best performers were less accurate than the worst. They conclude that judges at every skill level make similar degrees of error and offer a noise-plus-bias model in which perceptions of task difficulty drive miscalibration in relative comparisons.
Burson, Larrick and Klayman ask whether the pattern reported by Kruger and Dunning, in which unskilled performers lack insight into their relative standing, holds across tasks. Across twelve tasks in three studies they find that it does not hold generally: on moderately difficult tasks the best and worst performers differed little in the accuracy of their judgements, and on harder tasks the best performers were less accurate than the worst. They conclude that judges at every skill level make similar degrees of error and offer a noise-plus-bias model in which perceptions of task difficulty drive miscalibration in relative comparisons.
Written from the abstract, Duke Scholars record.
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Burson, K. A., Larrick, R. P., & Klayman, J. (2006). Skilled or unskilled, but still unaware of it: How perceptions of difficulty drive miscalibration in relative comparisons. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90(1), 60-77. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.90.1.60