Dee Gill wrote an article for UCLA Anderson Review titled Unflattering Facts Don’t Dent Positive Self-Assessments (17 September 2025).
« People rate selves better than average, even faced with objective data to the contrary. »
« The most incompetent people, in whatever skill researchers ask about, tend to overestimate themselves by the widest margin. People who actually are above average are often pretty good at self-assessment, and some rock stars even mistake themselves as closer to average than they are. This Dunning-Kruger effect persists when subjects report on subjective attributes, such as honesty,friendship skills and the ability to identify a funny joke. »
« A paper published in Psychological Science raises doubts about the not-enough-evidence excuse for overconfidence. Even hardcore facts — ones that should calibrate our self-assessments — do little or nothing to dent unwarranted optimism about oneself, suggests the paper, by the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Patrick R. Heck, UCLA Anderson’s Daniel J. Benjamin, University of Illinois’ Daniel J. Simons and Geisigner Health System’s Christopher F. Chabris. »
Articles of Interest 