Sane Self-Assessment

How well do you compare how you compare?

On a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is “poor” and 10 is “excellent,” how would you rate your competence and achievement level?

I could ask you to answer quickly, but an uncontextualized answer to such a question might obscure more than it illuminates. First off, there is no way for me to know what you think a given degree of success or failure means. Secondly, I probably don’t even know what tasks or accomplishments you have in mind when you consider your successes and failures.

I can ask, and you can answer (“Uhh…7?”). But that tells me very little about your competence. What it tells me more clearly is how you perceive yourself compared to your own standards and ambitions — and it will probably be biased by whatever you think I want to hear.

People’s self-assessments are commonly skewed in two common ways: we call them the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and Impostor Syndrome. The DK Effect is best known as the tendency for people with a low level of skill or expertise to drastically overestimate their competence on a subject, relative to others.

For instance, I learned long ago that 9 out of 10 drivers regard themselves as being “above average,” while half of drivers consider themselves to be in the top 10% for skill level [1]. Obviously, this is impossible (unless the distribution of driving skill is extremely skewed). But that is what people believe. This bit of information made me chuckle. But it was only when I…