Lake Wobegon be gone! The "below-average effect" and the egocentric nature of comparative ability judgments.

Abstract

Like the inhabitants of Garrison Keillor's (1985) fictional community of Lake Wobegon, most people appear to believe that their skills and abilities are above average. A series of studies illustrates one of the reasons why: when people compare themselves with their peers, they focus egocentrically on their own skills and insufficiently take into account the skills of the comparison group. This tendency engenders the oft-documented above-average effect in domains in which absolute skills tend to be high but produces a reliable below-average effect in domains in which absolute skills tend to be low (Studies 1 and 2). In Study 3, cognitive load exacerbated these biases, suggesting that people "anchor" on their assessment of their own abilities and insufficiently "adjust" to take into account the skills of the comparison group. These results suggest that the tendency to see oneself as above average may not be as ubiquitous as once thought.

Skilled or unskilled, but still unaware of it: How perceptions of difficulty drive miscalibration in relative comparisons.

“…This replicates the results of Kruger (1999) that the more difficult the task, the lower the overall percentile estimate. As hoped, two distinct levels of difficulty were sampled in this study.…”

“…Accordingly, estimates of relative standing are rather regressive: The best performers do not guess how well they have done; the poorest performers do not guess how badly they have done. At the same time, as Kruger (1999) found, there is a systematic effect of task difficulty. People give lower estimates of their relative standing when Skilled or Unskilled 23 they find the task more difficult.…”

“…Estimates of relative standing are not only noisy because of random error and poor feedback, they are also prone to systematic bias: People feel they are worse than average on tasks on which everyone performs poorly, and above average on tasks on which everyone performs well (confirming the finding of Kruger, 1999). Kruger interprets this result as implying that judges anchor on their own absolute performance and adjust insufficiently for the knowledge they have of other people.…”

“…However, Kruger and Dunning look at only one judgment context-one in which participants on average believe they are above average. In fact, research by Kruger (1999) showed that this condition is not as universal as it was thought to be. He found that on easy tasks (such as using a computer mouse), people estimate their performance as better than average, whereas on hard tasks (such as juggling), people estimate themselves as worse than average.…”

“…In this between-participants design, 47 students took an easier quiz about University of Chicago trivia and 43 students took a harder quiz about University of Chicago trivia. Care was taken to ensure that the harder task was not below some "minimal threshold of knowledge, theory, or experience" as cautioned by Kruger and Dunning (1999, p. 1132); the harder trivia were answered well above chance level (as, of course, were the easier trivia).Procedure. Participants were told that they would be taking a 20-question quiz about the University of Chicago.…”