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In an interview with “Fox News” in 2018, he was asked how he evaluated his performance. “I would give myself an A+,” replied Donald Trump, 77, who had just completed the first year of his presidency at the time. “Intuitively, we could probably all say that Trump is overestimating himself,” says Mariëtte van Loon (41), a psychologist who researches metacognition at the University of Zurich.
“To test the thesis about Trump, you need to have him identify 10 goals he wants to achieve and rate for each goal on a scale of 0 to 100 how confident he is that he will achieve them. “The more Trump fails at the goals he is sure of, the more his overconfidence will grow.”
If you know too much, you’ll get restless quicker.
Research has shown that ignorance often leads to more confidence than knowledge. What seems paradoxical is understandable: For example, someone who is unaware of how many mistakes he or she might make approaches a task with more confidence than someone who knows everything that could go wrong.
When incompetent people overestimate their abilities, the Dunning-Kruger effect is often invoked as an explanation; This effect is named after two American psychologists who studied this phenomenon in the late 1990s. The two defined their mechanisms with four points:
- Incompetent people often overestimate their own abilities.
- They fail to realize the extent of their incompetence.
- They cannot improve their competence due to their ignorance.
- As a result, they underestimate the superior abilities of other people.
Organizational psychologists like to convey this vicious cycle of incompetence to the business world. It explains why “weak” employees often see themselves as particularly “strong” (point 1). They basically don’t know how uninformed they are (point 2). They don’t learn anything more because they feel like they already know everything (point 3). The gap to competent workers is increasing (point 4).
Mariëtte van Loon says that the concept of the Dunning-Kruger effect is controversial because it is based on very general statements and does not really address the level of difficulty of a task and the person who has to solve it.
Van Loon is currently working on a study that spans three years. During this time, a group of 600 young people ages 12 to 15 will be measured a total of 18 times using personal goals and other indicators to see how the study participants’ self-evaluations improve from the time they enter secondary school.
Van Loon says that at this stage, when one is slowly entering adulthood, it is especially important to understand what abilities you have and which ones you do not have (yet). This is the only way to regulate your behavior. In other words: learn from mistakes. “In the long run, assessing yourself accurately has more impact on good performance than intelligence.”
Feedback without negative consequences
How do you learn to evaluate yourself correctly in daily tasks? Van Loon says the most important thing is 360-degree feedback. This means you’ll get feedback on your work from all sides, without having to fear negative consequences. Concrete feedback from superiors is important. Just like the feedback from our colleagues. “To do this you need to feel safe in the team and not be afraid to step on anyone’s toes.”
Van Loon says he remembers when he wrote his doctoral thesis. “I was looked after very well but it also meant that when I came back to messages everything was marked in red. It’s the only way I can get better at writing.”
Source : Blick
I am Dawid Malan, a news reporter for 24 Instant News. I specialize in celebrity and entertainment news, writing stories that capture the attention of readers from all walks of life. My work has been featured in some of the world’s leading publications and I am passionate about delivering quality content to my readers.
