Given that people who have excellent self-control self-assess the fact accurately, it’s almost tautological that overestimation of their self-control is correlated with low self-control.
Also, don’t people (who aren’t depressed) overestimate nearly every virtue in themselves (self-serving bias)?
I approve of this post, because the facts in it are useful.
Another surface pattern: “those with low ‘self-control’ tend to overestimate their ‘self-control’ the most” is an instance of the Dunning-Kruger effect, where you substitute any skill for ‘self-control’. I don’t think that it’s deeply meaningful to do so, however; I think self-control is a more basic phenomenon than the kind of performance competencies studied by DK.
The Dunning-Kruger effect has been disputed, mostly by people saying that the pattern of results is just due to regression to the mean rather than a lack of metacognitive skill, but the debate is ongoing. Dunning, Kruger, and others have a 2008 paper (pdf) which includes a summary of the criticisms and a defense of their original interpretation.
According to my cursory research over the past five minutes, not obviously—do you have a specific idea of which results have been disconfirmed? (The “Lake Wobegon effect”—that everyone considers themselves above average—has been widely confirmed, I believe.)
People are inaccurate judges of how their abilities compare to others’. J. Kruger and D. Dunning (1999, 2002) argued that unskilled performers in particular lack metacognitive insight about their relative performance and disproportionately account for better-than-average effects. The unskilled overestimate their actual percentile of performance, whereas skilled performers more accurately predict theirs. However, not all tasks show this bias. In a series of 12 tasks across 3 studies, the authors show that on moderately difficult tasks, best and worst performers differ very little in accuracy, and on more difficult tasks, best performers are less accurate than worst performers in their judgments. This pattern suggests that judges at all skill levels are subject to similar degrees of error. The authors propose that a noise-plus-bias model of judgment is sufficient to explain the relation between skill level and accuracy of judgments of relative standing.
...it appears that these authors are disputing the mechanism proposed by Dunning and Kruger, proposing a simpler one. The data remain the same, but the theory changes.
Assuming results such as these are upheld, we may certainly say that the Dunning-Kruger effect is refuted, but people far below average will still consider themselves above average, on average.
Given that people who have excellent self-control self-assess the fact accurately, it’s almost tautological that overestimation of their self-control is correlated with low self-control.
Also, don’t people (who aren’t depressed) overestimate nearly every virtue in themselves (self-serving bias)?
I approve of this post, because the facts in it are useful.
Two concepts to distinguish: significant overestimation of self-control (relative) vs. high estimation of self-control (absolute).
I agree that it’s not exactly tautological.
Another surface pattern: “those with low ‘self-control’ tend to overestimate their ‘self-control’ the most” is an instance of the Dunning-Kruger effect, where you substitute any skill for ‘self-control’. I don’t think that it’s deeply meaningful to do so, however; I think self-control is a more basic phenomenon than the kind of performance competencies studied by DK.
I see Dunning-Kruger mentioned all the time, but hasn’t it been discredited?
The Dunning-Kruger effect has been disputed, mostly by people saying that the pattern of results is just due to regression to the mean rather than a lack of metacognitive skill, but the debate is ongoing. Dunning, Kruger, and others have a 2008 paper (pdf) which includes a summary of the criticisms and a defense of their original interpretation.
According to my cursory research over the past five minutes, not obviously—do you have a specific idea of which results have been disconfirmed? (The “Lake Wobegon effect”—that everyone considers themselves above average—has been widely confirmed, I believe.)
I don’t remember it quite myself, so I had to google and came up with this: http://neuroskeptic.blogspot.com/2008/11/kruger-dunning-revisited.html
There is a link to a study there.
Looking at the abstract:
...it appears that these authors are disputing the mechanism proposed by Dunning and Kruger, proposing a simpler one. The data remain the same, but the theory changes.
Assuming results such as these are upheld, we may certainly say that the Dunning-Kruger effect is refuted, but people far below average will still consider themselves above average, on average.