Imperfect Self-Assessments

Study 1: Humor

In Study 1, we decided to explore people’s perceptions of their competence in a domain that requires sophisticated knowledge and wisdom about the tastes and reactions of other people. That domain was humor.

To anticipate what is and what others will find funny, one must have subtle and tacit knowledge about other people’s tastes.

Thus, in Study 1 we presented participants with a series of jokes and asked them to rate the humor of each one.

We then compared their ratings with those provided by a panel of experts, namely, professional comedians who make their living by recognizing what is funny and reporting it to their audiences.

By comparing each participant’s ratings with those of our expert panel, we could roughly assess participants’ ability to spot humor.

Our key interest was how perceptions of that ability converged with actual ability. Specifically, we wanted to discover whether . those who did poorly on our measure would recognize the low quality of their performance. Would they recognize it or would they be unaware?

Method

Participants. Participants were 65 Cornell University undergraduates from a variety of courses in psychology who earned extra credit for their participation.

Materials. We created a 30-item questionnaire made up of jokes we felt were of varying comedic value. Jokes were taken from Woody Allen (1975), Al Frankin (1992). and a book of “really silly” pet jokes by Jeff Rovin (1996).

To assess joke quality, we contacted several professional comedians via electronic mail and asked them to rate each joke on a scale ranging from 1 (not at all funny) to 11 (very funny). Eight comedians responded to our request (Bob Crawford, Costaki Economopoulos, Paul Frisbie, Kathleen Madigan, Ann Rose, Allan Sitterson, David Spark, and Dan St. Paul).

Although the ratings provided by the eight comedians were moderately reliable (a = .72), an analysis of interrater correlations found that one (and only one) comedian’s ratings failed to correlate positively with the others (mean r = - .09).

We thus excluded this comedian’s ratings in our calculation of the humor value of each joke, yielding a final a of .76. Expert ratings revealed that jokes ranged from the not so funny (e.g., “Question: What is big as a man, but weighs nothing? Answer: His shadow.” Mean expert rating = 1.3) to the very funny (e.g., “If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is ‘God is crying.’

And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is ‘probably because of something you did.”’ Mean expert rating = 9.6). Procedure. Participants rated each joke on the same 11-point scale used by the comedians. Afterward, participants compared their “ability to recognize what’s funny” with that of the average Cornell student by providing a percentile ranking. In this and in all subsequent studies, we explained that percentile rankings could range from 0 (I’m at the very bottom) to 50 (I’m exactly average) to 99 (I’m at the very top).

Results and Discussion

Gender failed to qualify any results in this or any of the studies reported in this article, and thus receives no further mention.

Our first prediction was that participants overall would overestimate their ability to tell what is funny relative to their peers. To find out whether this was the case, we first assigned each participant a percentile rank based on the extent to which his or her joke ratings correlated with the ratings provided by our panel of professionals (with higher correlations corresponding to better performance). On average, participants put their ability to recognize what is funny in the 66th percentile, which exceeded the actual mean percentile (50, by definition) by 16 percentile points, onesample t(64) = 7.02, p < .0001. This overestimation occurred even though self-ratings of ability were significantly correlated with our measure of actual ability, r(63) = .39, p < .001.

Our main focus, however, is on the perceptions of relatively “incompetent” participants, which we defined as those whose test score fell in the bottom quartile (n = 16). As Figure 1 depicts, these participants grossly overestimated their ability relative to their peers. Whereas their actual performance fell in the 12th percentile, they put themselves in the 58th percentile. These estimates were not only higher than the ranking they actually achieved, paired t(15) = 10.33, p < .0001, but were also marginally higher than a ranking of “average” (i.e., the 50th percentile), one-sample t(l5) = 1.96, p < .07. That is, even participants in the bottom quarter of the distribution tended to feel that they were better than average.

As Figure 1 illustrates, participants in other quartiles did not overestimate their ability to the same degree. Indeed, those in the

Figure I. Perceived ability to recognize humor as a function of actual test performance (Study 1).

top quartile actually underestimated their ability relative to their peers, paired t(15) = -2.20, p < .05.

Summary

In short, Study 1 revealed two effects of interest. First, although perceptions of ability were modestly correlated with actual ability, people tended to overestimate their ability relative to their peers. Second, and most important, those who performed particularly poorly relative to their··peers were utterly unaware of this fact. Participants scoring in the bottom quartile on our humor test not only overestimated their percentile ranking, but they overestimated it by 46 percentile points. To be sure, they had an inkling that they were not as talented in this domain as were participants in the top quartile, as evidenced by the significant correlation between perceived and actual ability. However, that suspicion failed to anticipate the magnitude of their shortcomings.

At first blush, the reader may point to the regression effect as an alternative interpretation of our results. After all, we examined the perceptions of people who had scored extremely poorly on the objective test we handed them, and found that their perceptions were less extreme than their reality. Because perceptions of ability are imperfectly correlated with actual ability, the regression effect virtually guarantees this result. Moreover, because incompetent participants scored close to the bottom of the distribution, it was nearly impossible for them to underestimate their performance. Despite the inevitability of the regression effect, we believe that the overestimation we observed was more psychological than artifactual. For one, if regression alone were to blame for our results, then the magnitude of miscalibration among the bottom quartile would be comparable with that of the top quartile. A glance at Figure 1 quickly disabuses one of this notion. Still, we believe this issue warrants empirical attention, which we devote in