Are we as intelligent as we think? (www.sciencedirect.com)

submitted 1 year ago by sizeoftheuniverse@programming.dev to c/science@beehaw.org

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Interestingly, almost 80 % of participants rated their intelligence as above average, with males reporting significantly higher self-estimated intelligence scores than females. However, we found no significant relationship between self-estimated intelligence and ICAR-16 scores. These results suggest that there may be a discrepancy between our perceived intelligence and our actual cognitive ability, or that we may have a fallacious understanding of our intelligence levels.

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[-] TheHalc@sopuli.xyz 6 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is reminiscent of social media's favourite, the Dunning-Kruger effect, where in order to assess the level of an attribute that applies to them, an individual must use that attribute itself.

This suggests that there's no relationship between self-assessed and measured intelligence at all as opposed to Dunning-Kruger's exaggerated gap at the low end.

I wonder why Dunning-Kruger doesn't seem to apply here.

[-] 14th_cylon@lemm.ee 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I wonder why Dunning-Kruger doesn’t seem to apply here.

because dunning-kruger is something else than you think.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias[2] whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a type of task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge. Some researchers also include the opposite effect for high performers: their tendency to underestimate their skills. **In popular culture, the Dunning–Kruger effect is often misunderstood as a claim about general overconfidence of people with low intelligence instead of specific overconfidence of people unskilled at a particular task. **

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning%E2%80%93Kruger_effect

[-] TheHalc@sopuli.xyz 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yes, I've read the Wikipedia article. That sentence is a little misleading, as the original study was arguably about both.

The initial study by David Dunning and Justin Kruger examined the performance and self-assessment of undergraduate students in the fields of inductive, deductive, and abductive logical reasoning, English grammar, and appreciation of humor.

Edit: ...with the reasoning tests being a crude proxy for intelligence.

Note that I was careful not to mention intelligence in my original post either.