The Role Of Overconfidence In Promoting Subsequent Learning Performance: The Mediating Role Of Dissatisfaction And Effort

Human beings usually advocate that people should recognize ourselves accurately and make accurate estimations about ourselves in our daily life.However,researchers found that human beings often overestimate their own abilities and performances.Overconfidence is pervasive in many fields.Early researchers who focused on overconfidence thought of overconfidence as disaster which could result in a large amount of adverse outcomes,such as decision-making errors in a war and diagnostic errors in medicine.Therefore,many researchers criticize this trait and even attempted to mitigate overconfidence.The theory of positive illusions(Taylor&Brown,1988)makes researchers re-understand the effects of overconfidence.This theory does not focus on the disadvantages of overconfidence,but propose a series of benefits of overconfidence.Subsequently,social cognitive theory(Bandura,1989)was proposed.This theory does not state the advantages of overconfidence directly but suggests some positive effects of high expectations.Overconfidence is high expectations about oneself.Therefore,Social cognitive theory also emphasizes on the benefits of overconfidence indirectly.After these two theories,more and more researchers tried to explore the benefits of overconfidence and found that overconfidence could help individuals enhance their level of efforts and persistence(Bandura,1997),as well as social status(Anderson et al.,2012).Few studies test the positive effects of overconfidence on academic performance.Until now,just Bi(2011)designed an experiment to examine "whether overconfidence enhance subsequent performance and the internal mechanism".The results of her study revealed that overconfidence could help students improve their subsequent performance.The results also showed that dissatisfaction with the current performance mediated the relationships between overconfidence and subsequent performance.However,her study had some limitations.The study did not validate the effect of effort.What's more,the study had no control group.Therefore,based on the study of Bi,the current research involved two studies to examine the enhancing effect of overconfidence on subsequent performance and the potential mediation effects of dissatisfaction and effort.Study 1 asked participants to complete English learning and the corresponding test twice,self assessment before learning and test and the measure of dissatisfaction and effort.The results of study 1 revealed that a majority of subjects were overconfident.Overconfident subjects would dissatisfied with their first performance and exert more effort in subsequent learning to achieve a better performance.As a consequence,their subsequent performance was improved.Study 1 adopted overestimation to test the effects of overconfidence.Study 2 used another definition of overconfidence,that is,overplacement,to test the effects.The procedure of study 2 was same basically as study 1.In addition,study 2 included a control group where participant received false feedback about their performance.The treatment group received real feedback about their performance.The results showed that overconfident participants in the treatment group improved their subsequent performance.Furthermore,dissatisfaction with the first performance and incremental effort were the strategies to narrow the gap between the two performances.However,when people were not aware of their performance gap,they would neither dissatisfy with their first performance nor improve their subsequent performance even though they were overconfident.The results extend the benefits of overconfidence well into the field of academic performance and enrich the theoretic frameworks of advantages of overconfidence greatly.Moreover,the results can direct teachers for students' education to some extent,which had great practical values.