(In)Competence Is Everywhere: Self-Doubt and the Accessibility of Competence

Abstract

This research investigated the hypothesis that intellectual competence is chronically accessible to individuals who question their own intellectual competence, despite their own uncertainty on this dimension, and that they rely on intellectual competence in forming impressions of and thinking about others. In two studies, we show that doubtful individuals are more likely to use traits related to intellectual competence to describe others and these traits more strongly affect their overall impressions of others. These findings support recent approaches to accessibility by showing that a self-relevant trait may be chronically accessible to an individual even in the face of uncertainty regarding one's standing on the trait. The findings also contribute to the understanding of the phenomenology of self-doubt.We suggest that people who are uncertain about their own intellect may be preoccupied with intellectual competence, including their own, and so intelligence is chronically accessible to individuals who are uncertain about their own competence. We find that this accessibility influences their perceptions of others. Understanding how chronic accessibility of intelligence shapes self-doubtful individuals' judgments is crucial to understanding the phenomenology of self-doubt, an issue that has not yet received much attention. Furthermore, finding chronic accessibility of self-relevant traits under conditions of uncertainty, where certainty and clarity have been the usual suspects to inspire chronic accessibility, extends what is known about accessibility of self-relevant traits in general and is a contribution to the social cognition literature more generally. Category AccessibilityMore than half a century ago, Bruner (1957) argued that perceivers encode incoming information in terms of accessible categories. Since then, this idea has gained considerable empirical validation (see Higgins, 1996, for a review).

Self-doubt in Nursing Students

“…1,7,25 Regardless of the discipline, few researchers have used and measured the concept of self-doubt. Hardy et al 12 examined the relationship between self-doubt and individuals' intellectual abilities, which provided information on the phenomenon of self-doubt from a personal intellectual competence perspective. Balkis and Duru 13 examined the relationship between self-doubt and other concepts, such as self-downing, which revealed that self-doubt acts as a mediator between self-downing and student procrastination.…”

Wanting to Be Different Predicts Nonmotivated Change

“…Although we have argued that self -discrepancies open oneself up to self -change, it is possible that self-discrepancies leave all of a person’s prime-relevant judgments (e.g., judgments of other people) susceptible to such malleability, and not only those that are related to the self. In a recent article, for example, doubts about one’s own level of academic competence (a potential indicator of self-discrepancies on this dimension) predicted the accessibility of the competence dimension and the degree to which it was used in judging others (Hardy, Govorun, Schneller, Fazio, & Arkin, 2015). We argue that self-discrepancies represent a structural incongruence in the self-representation, and as such, it is the malleability of the active self that should be most predicted by discrepancy magnitude.…”