Department of Psychology, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX 77843, USA.
J Exp Psychol Learn Mem Cogn. 2011 Mar;37(2):502-6. doi: 10.1037/a0021802.
People are generally overconfident in their self-assessments and this overconfidence effect is greatest for people of poorer abilities. For example, poor students predict that they will perform much better on exams than they do. One explanation for this result is that poor performers in general are doubly cursed: They lack knowledge of the material, and they lack awareness of the knowledge that they do and do not possess. The current studies examined whether poor performers in the classroom are truly unaware of their deficits by examining the relationship between students' exam predictions and their confidence in these predictions. Relative to high-performing students, the poorer students showed a greater overconfidence effect (i.e., their predictions were greater than their performance), but they also reported lower confidence in these predictions. Together, these results suggest that poor students are indeed unskilled but that they may have some awareness of their lack of metacognitive knowledge.
人们通常对自己的评价过于自信，而这种过度自信的效应在能力较差的人身上最为明显。例如，成绩较差的学生预测自己在考试中的表现会比实际表现好得多。对于这一结果的一种解释是，一般来说，表现较差的人受到了双重诅咒：他们缺乏对材料的了解，并且对自己拥有和不拥有的知识缺乏意识。本研究通过考察学生考试预测与他们对这些预测的信心之间的关系，来检验课堂上表现较差的学生是否真的对自己的不足缺乏认识。与表现较好的学生相比，成绩较差的学生表现出更大的过度自信效应（即他们的预测高于他们的表现），但他们对这些预测的信心也较低。总的来说，这些结果表明，成绩较差的学生确实缺乏技能，但他们可能对自己缺乏元认知知识有一定的认识。
