Dunning–Kruger effect Cognitive bias about one's own skill Relation between average self-perceived performance and average actual performance on a college exam. The red area shows the tendency of low performers to overestimate their abilities. Nevertheless, low performers' self-assessment is lower than that of high performers. The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias[2] whereby people with low ability, expertise, or experience regarding a certain type of task or area of knowledge tend to overestimate their ability or knowledge. The Dunning–Kruger effect is usually measured by comparing self-assessment with objective performance. The Dunning–Kruger effect is usually explained in terms of metacognitive abilities. Many debates surrounding the Dunning–Kruger effect and criticisms of it focus on the metacognitive explanation without denying the empirical findings. Definition[edit] Some researchers emphasize the metacognitive component in their definition. Measurement and analysis[edit] Studies[edit] [edit]
Can Playing the Computer Game “Tetris” Reduce the Build-Up of Flashbacks for Trauma? A Proposal from Cognitive Science 10 Brilliant Social Psychology Studies Ten of the most influential social psychology experiments. “I have been primarily interested in how and why ordinary people do unusual things, things that seem alien to their natures.Why do good people sometimes act evil?Why do smart people sometimes do dumb or irrational things?” Like eminent social psychologist Professor Philip Zimbardo (author of The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil), I’m also obsessed with why we do dumb or irrational things. The answer quite often is because of other people – something social psychologists have comprehensively shown. Over the past few months I’ve been describing 10 of the most influential social psychology experiments. Each one tells a unique, insightful story relevant to all our lives, every day. 1. The ‘halo effect’ is a classic social psychology experiment. » Read on about the halo effect -» 2. » Read on about cognitive dissonance -» 3. » Read on about Sherif’s Robbers Cave experiment -» 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.
High Self-Perception, Low Brain Activity By Rick Nauert PhD Senior News Editor Reviewed by John M. Grohol, Psy.D. on January 7, 2010 Researchers have discovered the less you use your brain’s frontal lobes, the more you see yourself through rose-colored glasses. “In healthy people, the more you activate a portion of your frontal lobes, the more accurate your view of yourself is,” says Jennifer Beer, a University of Texas assistant professor of psychology. “And the more you view yourself as desirable or better than your peers, the less you use those lobes.” Those findings are being published in the February edition of the journal NeuroImage. The natural human tendency to see oneself in a positive light can be helpful and motivating in some situations but detrimental in others, Beer says. Her research, conducted at the university’s Imaging Research Center, gives new insight into the relationship among brain functions and human emotion and perceptions. Source: University of Texas at Austin APA Reference Nauert, R. (2010).
To Predict Dating Success, The Secret's In The Pronouns : Shots - Health Blog hide captionPeople who are interested in and paying close attention to each other begin to speak more alike, a psychologist says. iStockphoto.com People who are interested in and paying close attention to each other begin to speak more alike, a psychologist says. On a recent Friday night, 30 men and 30 women gathered at a hotel restaurant in Washington, D.C. Their goal was love, or maybe sex, or maybe some combination of the two. The women sat at separate numbered tables while the men moved down the line, and for two solid hours they did a rotation, making small talk with people they did not know, one after another, in three-minute increments. I had gone to record the night, which was put on by a company called Professionals in the City, and what struck me was the noise in the room. What were these people saying? And what can we learn from what they are saying? That is why I called James Pennebaker, a psychologist interested in the secret life of pronouns. The. Dear Dr.
Why Intelligent People Use More Drugs The human consumption of psychoactive drugs , such as marijuana , cocaine , and heroin, is of even more recent historical origin than the human consumption of alcohol or tobacco, so the Hypothesis would predict that more intelligent people use more drugs more frequently than less intelligent individuals. The use of opium dates back to about 5,000 years ago, and the earliest reference to the pharmacological use of cannabis is in a book written in 2737 BC by the Chinese Emperor Shen Nung. Opium and cannabis are the only “natural” (agricultural) psychoactive drugs. Other psychoactive drugs are “chemical” (pharmacological); they require modern chemistry to manufacture, and are therefore of much more recent origin. Morphine was isolated from opium in 1806, cocaine was first manufactured in 1860, and heroin was discovered in 1874. The following graph shows a similar association between childhood intelligence and the latent factor for the consumption of psychoactive drugs among Americans.
Female Depression - ELLE Investigates Why Women are Unhappy in Life At long last, it's been scientifically, mathematically, and economically proven: Women are kinda bummed out. And not just since the unemployment rate started creeping toward 10 percent; we have been sinking into this funk for the past 35 years. According to a perplexing new study from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, women have experienced a steady erosion in happiness since the early 1970s, such that, while we used to test as happier than men, we are now notably less stoked than the hairier sex. The finding holds across many different polls and no matter how you slice the data—whether you are married, single, teenaged, elderly, rich or poor, American or European, a single mother or a child-free career gal—if you have two X chromosomes you are, statistically speaking, probably less happy than the dudes you know (who have become slightly more happy than they used to be, though still not as happy as women were in 1972).
Google Begins Testing Its Augmented-Reality Glasses Photos via GoogleGoogle showed off its first venture into wearable computing, called Project Glass. If you venture into a coffee shop in the coming months and see someone with a pair of futuristic glasses that look like a prop from “Star Trek,” don’t worry. It’s probably just a Google employee testing the company’s new augmented-reality glasses. On Wednesday, Google gave people a clearer picture of its secret initiative called Project Glass. The glasses are not yet for sale. In a post shared on Google Plus, employees in the company laboratory known as Google X, including Babak Parviz, Steve Lee and Sebastian Thrun, asked people for input about the prototype of Project Glass. “We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input,” the three employees wrote. The prototype version Google showed off on Wednesday looked like a very polished and well-designed pair of wrap-around glasses with a clear display that sits above the eye.
Wake up to nap time Jill Murphy Long of Steamboat Springs, Colo., used to sneak naps. Her husband, she says, would occasionally find her asleep in the middle of the day. "He'd say, 'What are you doing? Are you sick?' The experience led Long, a former advertising executive turned yoga and ski instructor, to write a book for other tired women, called Permission to Nap. But these days, just about anyone who craves a midday snooze can find plenty of encouragement. •Greek adults who took regular naps were significantly less likely to die of heart disease than those who didn't in a study published in the Archives of Internal Medicine in February. •Fast-living New Yorkers are paying $12 and up to nap at trendy sleep salons, the New York Times reported recently. •A psychologist who has spent her career studying naps is promoting a new book, Take a Nap: Change Your Life (Workman Publishing), which says napping is an underappreciated route to health and well-being. Share this story:
Self-sculpting sand Imagine that you have a big box of sand in which you bury a tiny model of a footstool. A few seconds later, you reach into the box and pull out a full-size footstool: The sand has assembled itself into a large-scale replica of the model. That may sound like a scene from a Harry Potter novel, but it’s the vision animating a research project at the Distributed Robotics Laboratory (DRL) at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. Unlike many other approaches to reconfigurable robots, smart sand uses a subtractive method, akin to stone carving, rather than an additive method, akin to snapping LEGO blocks together. Distributed intelligence Algorithmically, the main challenge in developing smart sand is that the individual grains would have very few computational resources. To attach to each other, to communicate and to share power, the cubes use 'electropermanent magnets,' materials whose magnetism can be switched on and off with jolts of electricity. Rapid prototyping