Unskilled and Unaware
Creative_NRG (483 pencils) | Thu, 2007-08-30 07:41I've always been interested in psychology and ran across an old link to a study by two Cornell professors that reminded me about a curious phenomenon in the world.
Generally speaking, people tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitve ability to realize it.
The graphs show a pretty clear pattern in which the unskilled greatly 'overestimate' their ability, while above average people were fairly close in their prediction and the really smart ones actually 'underestimated' their ability a bit.
Thank goodness for he critique area. ;)
In other words? ;)
People who suck at what they do, like me, don't realize it.
mokenke
I was waiting for someone smart enough to translate the professors work.
Technically, by saying your design skills suck you just proved the opposite because in order to make that assesment your cognitive abilities need to be high enough not to be classified stupid. ;)
A few past critiques come to mind but you DEFINATELY don't fall into that category.
Like they say, ignorance is bliss. hehe
so, from what i understand
people that have no idea what they're doing think that their work is better than it is.
people that DO know what they are doing think that their work is equally as good as the people that have no idea what it is [or possibly slightly worse] but they are, in fact correctly assessing their work.
so, unless you know for certain how skilled you are, there is no real way to know how good your work is, because you might be skilled [and therefore your assessment of your work is correct] or you might be very unskilled [and therefore your assessment of your work is incorrect]
andrew harrison
http://andrew.harrison.org