How We Fool Ourselves
Prejudices, biases, assumptions, and blind spots often
influence our decisions and our actions. We tend to believe that we know more
than we really do. We often
overestimate our capacities and competence. It is very hard to see past our
small world of experience and recognize the limits of our knowledge.
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Misperceiving Our Competence
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"People typically provide overly optimistic social comparisons when rating their competence relative to their peers. Previous work has shown that poor performers overestimate their performances the most because their incompetence deprives them of the skills needed to recognize their deficits. Five studies demonstrated that poor performers lack insight into their shortcomings even in real world settings and when given incentives to be accurate. An additional meta-analysis showed that it was lack of insight into their errors (and not mistaken assessments of their peers) that led to overly optimistic social comparison estimates among poor performers. Along the way, these studies ruled out recent alternative accounts that have been proposed to explain why poor performers hold such positive impressions of their performance."
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Information Naïveté
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