The Study Of The Dunning-Kruger Effect And Its Influence Factors

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people mistakenly evaluate their ability in a given task. This is especially true for unskilled individuals, who often overestimate their ability, and sometimes even falsely rate their ability much higher than average. On the other hand, more competent individuals often underestimate themselves. The reason is because regardless of high or low performers, there exist defects in their meta-cognition ability, which makes them unable to accurately recognize his ability. For the unskilled individuals, the deficiency in meta-cognition makes them highly estimate their ability level. However, for the performers with high ability, the clues they acquire to recognize their ability are from others, and in the absence of social comparison clues, they will not recognize the characteristics of their own ability, but mistakenly think that little difference in their level of competence and others, so are lower than the actual self evaluation. However, in the background of Chinese culture, whether it is the same for individuals of different levels of ability? If so, what are the influence factors? This thesis designs three researches to discuss whether individual would present Dunning-Kruger effect when evaluate his own ability and its influence factor. This research adopts questionnaire survey. First, make the participants complete an ability test, and then get the prediction from them about the test scores of correct answers and the ranking of their ability. After that, we analyze the data collected. In research1, the participant get a test about Chinese history; In research2, participant complete a test of verbal comprehension, and ask both of the bottom and top performers to finish it again after five weeks later. In the re-test, participants are shown two different questionnaires of others to observe, and re-predict the test scores of correct answers and the ranking of their ability. We take between-subjects experimental design to study research3. Participants get an ability test about simple logic judgment. In the Experimental group, we present a video about meta-cognition to improve the participants’logical judgment competence, while the control groups watch an unrelated video at the same time. After that, all the participants complete the test again and re-predict the test scores of correct answers and the ranking of their ability.We analysis the data with SPSS16.0, the results partially support the hypothesis, the main findings of the present research are as follows:(1)When judge their own ability, most people would put themselves above the average, but no more than10percentile ranking;(2)When makes self-evaluate of one’s ability, the unskilled individual often rate their ability much higher, even about the average. On the other hand, the more competent individuals often underestimate themselves;(3)When the unskilled individuals rate their own ability, they often focus more on themselves, while the more competent individuals would pay more attention to others;(4)Through meta-cognition training, the unskilled individual would lower their self-evaluation, while the more competent would improve, both of them are closer to the true level of ability.