Department of Psychology, Yale University, 2 Hillhouse Avenue, New Haven, CT, 06520-8205, USA.
Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, London, UK.
Psychon Bull Rev. 2017 Dec;24(6):1774-1784. doi: 10.3758/s13423-017-1242-7.
The Dunning-Kruger effect refers to the observation that the incompetent are often ill-suited to recognize their incompetence. Here we investigated potential Dunning-Kruger effects in high-level reasoning and, in particular, focused on the relative effectiveness of metacognitive monitoring among particularly biased reasoners. Participants who made the greatest numbers of errors on the cognitive reflection test (CRT) overestimated their performance on this test by a factor of more than 3. Overestimation decreased as CRT performance increased, and those who scored particularly high underestimated their performance. Evidence for this type of systematic miscalibration was also found on a self-report measure of analytic-thinking disposition. Namely, genuinely nonanalytic participants (on the basis of CRT performance) overreported their "need for cognition" (NC), indicating that they were dispositionally analytic when their objective performance indicated otherwise. Furthermore, estimated CRT performance was just as strong a predictor of NC as was actual CRT performance. Our results provide evidence for Dunning-Kruger effects both in estimated performance on the CRT and in self-reported analytic-thinking disposition. These findings indicate that part of the reason why people are biased is that they are either unaware of or indifferent to their own bias.
邓宁-克鲁格效应指的是，能力不足的人往往不适合识别自己的无能。在这里，我们研究了高水平推理中可能存在的邓宁-克鲁格效应，特别是关注了在特别有偏见的推理者中，元认知监测的相对有效性。在认知反射测试（CRT）中犯错误最多的参与者对自己在该测试中的表现的高估程度超过了 3 倍。随着 CRT 表现的提高，高估程度降低，而那些得分特别高的人则低估了自己的表现。在分析思维倾向的自我报告衡量标准上，也发现了这种类型的系统校准错误。也就是说，真正非分析性的参与者（根据 CRT 表现）过高地报告了他们的“认知需求”（NC），这表明他们在客观表现表明并非如此的情况下，在性格上是分析性的。此外，估计的 CRT 表现与实际的 CRT 表现一样，是 NC 的强有力预测指标。我们的研究结果为 CRT 上的估计绩效和自我报告的分析思维倾向中的邓宁-克鲁格效应提供了证据。这些发现表明，人们存在偏见的部分原因是他们没有意识到或对自己的偏见漠不关心。
