Have you ever walked out of a test thinking you did just fine only to find out that you didn’t do very well? Or….have you ever walked out of a test thinking you bombed it only to find out that you aced it? How can this be? Well, it turns out that we are not very good at assessing our own performance. Let’s look at some research in this area.
Kruger and Dunning wrote an article titled Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assesments (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1999, 77:1121). They showed ways in which those who performed the worst often thought they were doing just fine. In the example below you see that the people who performed the worst (in an assessment of humor) seemed to feel that they perform pretty much as well as the people who did the best on the test.
It is interesting to note that the people who performed the best on this exercise, underestimated their performance. While probably less important than those that overestimate their performance, but it might mean that people who are performing very well in a domain may waste their time trying to improve in areas they are strong in to the detriment of areas they are weaker (those areas that they perform poorly in but believe they are doing just fine). See the problem here – we may underestimate where perform well and over estimate where we perform poorly).
It might seem possible that if you just show people who are not performing well, examples of excellent performance that they would reset their sense of their own performance. So those that perform poorly, when shown examples of excellent performance, would be able to see that they were not performing well. The authors of this paper thought of this. Below shows what happens when you show poor performers samples of good performance. Turns out that they, not only still think they are doing well, but they actually increase their own sense of how they did. Weird right!? I have to tell you that I am fascinated by the people in the third quartile of perforce who seem to do a good job of assessing their performance both with and without examples of good performance. But for the rest of us, whether we are at the high end or the low end, we DO NOT do a good job of assessing our own performance.
So what is to be done? There are not a lot of easy answers, but I think a good start is to realize that we are not good at assessing our own performance. Then, if we can start with this, we have the opportunity to ask for help and feedback from others that we respect and trust. And I think that is an important point. If we are struggling to believe that we are not doing a good job, we need feedback from those that we believe have our best interests at heart. Those we trust. Find those people and maybe together we can be better at the things that are important to our performance.