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Those of us who consider ourselves an expert in one area or another are at risk of falling into a trap called “overclaiming”: this is the conclusion of scientists after a series of experiments.
And yet, isn’t that logical? Trust yourself, believe that you are definitely good at something… Studies show otherwise. Self-proclaimed experts are more likely to be those from whom more is expected than they can deliver. And then they begin to consider themselves professionals in areas in which, in fact, they do not understand anything.
People fall prey to inflated expectations for many reasons. For example, they want to change the opinion of others about themselves and try to look smarter. Most of the time, though, high expectations are unintentional. In fact, this is just a reassessment of knowledge.
Researchers from Cornell University (USA) decided to figure out when people have high expectations.1. They conducted a series of experiments.
In the first two experiments, participants assessed their knowledge in certain areas, and then talked about what they know about each of the 15 proposed terms (three of them were fictitious). The more experts in a certain field people considered themselves, the more they tried to demonstrate knowledge about non-existent terms as well. In another experiment, participants were warned that some of the terms were fictitious, and this reduced the level of overestimation of their abilities in general, but did not affect the direct relationship between ideas about their knowledge and inflated expectations.
Pass the tests
- Why are you acting childish?
In the last experiment, the researchers compared participants’ perceptions of their own (and others’) knowledge. They gave one group a rather difficult test in geography, and the other – the simplest one. People who did the simple test easily rated their knowledge higher than those who did the difficult version.
The result suggests that if you believe that you are well versed in the subject, but at the same time did not specifically study it, knowledge may turn out to be superficial, based on theory and incomprehensible sources (“I heard something somewhere”). Research also shows that those who think they know more than others are less likely to want to get an education and like to give advice in areas where their knowledge is rather meager.
See more at Scientific American editions.
1 S. Atir et al. «When Knowledge Knows No BoundsSelf-Perceived Expertise Predicts Claims of Impossible Knowledge», Psychological Science, онлайн-публикация, июль 2015.