It’s well known that we are generally not very good at understanding and assessing our own strengths and weaknesses, with the illusory superiority bias perhaps the most famous illustration of this blindspot, and whilst in many instances our misjudgements are fairly harmless, in the workplace having an accurate gauge on what we know is rather useful.

Doctors for instance, need to know the limits of their knowledge in order to make safe decisions.  It isn’t so much a case of being right all the time, but rather understanding what we don’t know and the reliability of our own knowledge.  It’s what’s known in the industry as metacognitive accuracy.

A recent paper set out to test whether our metacognitive accuracy is affected by the conditions under which we rack our brain.  For instance, if we’re rewarded for the right answer (or punished for the wrong one), does that make our judgement any better?

Interestingly, it emerged that the most accurate understanding of our own knowledge came when the threat of punishment was at its highest.  When the players would lose four points for an incorrect answer, they produced by far the most accurate responses.  Indeed, this was even more than the game in which players would receive four points for a correct answer, so the threat of punishment was more useful than the allure of reward.

Past performances are no indication

Does it really matter though?  A recent paper from the University of Kent highlights how little impact our perceptions seem to have on our performances however.  The study looked at how people perceive their levels of intuition, and whether this makes them better or worse at tasks requiring the skill.

It emerged that our level of confidence seems to have little baring on our subsequent performance.  Several hundred volunteers were first quizzed to ascertain their self-perceived levels of intuitiveness, before each then completing a number of tasks that revolved around intuition.  The task heavily relied upon participants figuring out a way to succeed without really knowing how they did so.

When the performances were analyzed, it emerged that those who described themselves as intuitive didn’t do any better than those who didn’t believe themselves to be intuitive.

Indeed, so weak was the correlation that nine times out of ten, someone who was extremely confident in their intuition would not outperform someone that wasn’t.

Of course, the whole point of the illusory superiority bias is that our perceptions don’t match reality, so it’s perhaps no surprise that those who think they’re intuitive really aren’t.