Intelligence, gender, and assessment method affect the accuracy of self‐estimated intelligence

Abstract

Self-estimates of intelligence (SEI), which influence to what extent people engage in and how well they perform at a task, are subject to distortion. Here, the distortion effects of individual differences in intelligence (IQ), gender, and proximal (with reference to test performance) and distal (with reference to IQ score distributions) assessments of SEI were tested in a sample of 200 British adults. The results showed that (1) people with lower IQ misestimated their SEI to a greater extent than people with high IQ; (2) this effect was more pronounced in distal than proximal measures of SEI; (3) SEI means did not differ significantly across gender but the IQ-related level of SEI distortion did; (4) this effect was greater for distal than proximal measurement; and (5) proximal SEI were on average less distorted than distal SEI scores and also correlated more closely with IQ. Overall, the findings suggest that the distal SEI assessment method resulted in greater gender- and IQ-related distortions of SEI.

I believe I’m good at orienting myself… But is that true?

“…Bryant 1991), that is to say what people think about their SA. Indeed, although many works have analysed gender differences in solving spatial tasks from the perspective of the skills and strategies used to perform them (see: Coluccia and Louse 2004;Lawton 2010), few studies have considered SA beliefs and gender differences, even though self-confidence and beliefs are known to influence spatial performance, as is also well documented in different areas such as intellectual and social skills (Dunning et al 2003;Von Stumm 2013).…”

Less intelligent and unaware? Accuracy and Dunning-Kruger effects for self-estimates of different aspects of intelligence

“…Notably, research on the Dunning-Kruger effect has also faced quite some criticism for its data analytical methods. In their seminal study, Kruger and Dunning (1999) first split their sample into quartiles based on participants' objective performance and then compared the average selfestimated and measured performance within each quartile (for comparable approaches, see e.g., Ehrlinger et al, 2008;von Stumm, 2014;West & Eaton, 2019). The authors' results indicated that people in the lowest quartile overestimated their performance greatly, while those in the top quartile underestimated themselves slightly.…”

Facts and findings: A reply to Powell and Nettelbeck (2014)

“…Although subjective achievement data are often biased (e.g. Dunning, Johnson, Ehrlinger, & Krueger, 2003;Freund & Kasten, 2012;von Stumm, 2013), and although differences in the time delay between actual performance and its recall are also likely to affect the results, neither issue was acknowledged by Powell and Nettelbeck's study title and text. However, what truly concerned us was Powell and Nettelbeck's suggestion that we, in our previous work, used similar data to assess academic performance.…”