People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

/pdf/unskilled-and-unaware-of-it-how-difficulties-in-recognizing-1eehsjerwq.pdf

Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.

The power of feedback.

Mother Nature knows best--How engineered organizations of the future will resemble natural-born systems.

Persuasive Technology: Using Computers to Change What We Think and Do

The culture of education

https://faculty.weber.edu/eamsel/Research%20Groups/Dual%20PRocess%20Research/New%20Papers/Steinberg%20(2008).pdf

A Social Neuroscience Perspective on Adolescent Risk-Taking.

Stigmatization can give rise to belonging uncertainty. In this state, people are sensitive to information diagnostic of the quality of their social connections. Two experiments tested how belonging uncertainty undermines the motivation and achievement of people whose group is negatively characterized in academic settings. In Experiment 1, students were led to believe that they might have few friends in an intellectual domain. Whereas White students were unaffected, Black students (stigmatized in academics) displayed a drop in their sense of belonging and potential. In Experiment 2, an intervention that mitigated doubts about social belonging in college raised the academic achievement (e.g., college grades) of Black students but not of White students. Implications for theories of achievement motivation and intervention are discussed.

http://lmcreadinglist.pbworks.com/f/Walton+%26+Cohen+(2007).pdf

A question of belonging: race, social fit, and achievement.

A brief intervention aimed at buttressing college freshmen's sense of social belonging in school was tested in a randomized controlled trial (N = 92), and its academic and health-related consequences over 3 years are reported. The intervention aimed to lessen psychological perceptions of threat on campus by framing social adversity as common and transient. It used subtle attitude-change strategies to lead participants to self-generate the intervention message. The intervention was expected to be particularly beneficial to African-American students (N = 49), a stereotyped and socially marginalized group in academics, and less so to European-American students (N = 43). Consistent with these expectations, over the 3-year observation period the intervention raised African Americans' grade-point average (GPA) relative to multiple control groups and halved the minority achievement gap. This performance boost was mediated by the effect of the intervention on subjective construal: It prevented students from seeing adversity on campus as an indictment of their belonging. Additionally, the intervention improved African Americans' self-reported health and well-being and reduced their reported number of doctor visits 3 years postintervention. Senior-year surveys indicated no awareness among participants of the intervention's impact. The results suggest that social belonging is a psychological lever where targeted intervention can have broad consequences that lessen inequalities in achievement and health.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/331/6023/1447.full.pdf

A Brief Social-Belonging Intervention Improves Academic and Health Outcomes of Minority Students

In major league baseball, a hitter could have a long and productive career by maintaining a .300 average, that is, by getting a base hit 30% of the time. A great deal of money could be earned and fame accrued. Yet the other 70% of the time, this player would have failed. The vast majority of attempts to hit the ball would result in ‘‘making an out’’ and thus pose a potential threat to the player’s sense of personal worth and social regard. Like major league baseball players, people in contemporary society face innumerable failures and self‐threats. These include substandard performance on the job or in class, frustrated goals or aspirations, information challenging the validity of long‐held beliefs, illness, the defeat of one’s political party in an election or of one’s favorite sports team in a playoV, scientific evidence suggesting that one is engaging in risky health behavior, negative feedback at work or in school, rejection in a romantic relationship, real and perceived social slights, interpersonal and intergroup conflict, the misbehavior of one’s child, the loss of a loved one, and so on. In the course of a given day, the potential number of events that could threaten people’s ‘‘moral and adaptive adequacy’’—their sense of themselves as good, virtuous, successful, and able to control important life outcomes (Steele, 1988)—seems limitless and likely to exceed the small number of events that aYrm it. A major undertaking for most people is to sustain self‐integrity when faced with the inevitable setbacks and disappointments of daily life—the 70% of the time 183

/pdf/the-psychology-of-self-defense-self-affirmation-theory-4s8wax4h1y.pdf

The Psychology of Self‐defense: Self‐Affirmation Theory

Four studies demonstrated both the power of group influence in persuasion and people's blindness to it. Even under conditions of effortful processing, attitudes toward a social policy depended almost exclusively upon the stated position of one's political party. This effect overwhelmed the impact of both the policy's objective content and participants' ideological beliefs (Studies 1-3), and it was driven by a shift in the assumed factual qualities of the policy and in its perceived moral connotations (Study 4). Nevertheless, participants denied having been influenced by their political group, although they believed that other individuals, especially their ideological adversaries, would be so influenced. The underappreciated role of social identity in persuasion is discussed.

/pdf/party-over-policy-the-dominating-impact-of-group-influence-2pic1e8wdz.pdf

Party over policy: The dominating impact of group influence on political beliefs.

Two randomized field experiments tested a social-psychological intervention designed to improve minority student performance and increase our understanding of how psychological threat mediates performance in chronically evaluative real-world environments. We expected that the risk of confirming a negative stereotype aimed at one's group could undermine academic performance in minority students by elevating their level of psychological threat. We tested whether such psychological threat could be lessened by having students reaffirm their sense of personal adequacy or "self-integrity." The intervention, a brief in-class writing assignment, significantly improved the grades of African American students and reduced the racial achievement gap by 40%. These results suggest that the racial achievement gap, a major social concern in the United States, could be ameliorated by the use of timely and targeted social-psychological interventions.

https://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/313/5791/1307.full.pdf

Geoffrey L. Cohen

Papers

A question of belonging: race, social fit, and achievement.

A Brief Social-Belonging Intervention Improves Academic and Health Outcomes of Minority Students

The Psychology of Self‐defense: Self‐Affirmation Theory

Party over policy: The dominating impact of group influence on political beliefs.

Reducing the racial achievement gap: a social-psychological intervention.