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  3. The truly incompetent may never know the depths of their own incompetence, a pair of social psychologists said on Thursday.

The truly incompetent may never know the depths of their own incompetence, a pair of social psychologists said on Thursday.

admin2010-04-30  58
问题     The truly incompetent may never know the depths of their own incompetence, a pair of social psychologists said on Thursday.
    "We found again and again that people who perform poorly relative to their peers tended to think that they did rather well," Justin Kruger, co-author of a study on the subject, said in a telephone interview.
    Kruger and co-author David Dunning found that when it came to a variety of skills—logical reasoning, grammar, even sense of humor—people who essentially were inept never realized it, while those who had some ability were self-critical.
    It had little to do with innate modesty, Kruger said, but rather with a central paradox: Incompetents lack the basic skills to evaluate their performance realistically. Once they get those skills, they know where they stand, even if that is at the bottom.
    Americans and Western Europeans especially had an unrealistically sunny assessment of their own capabilities, Dunning said by telephone in a separate interview, while Japanese and Koreans tended to give a reasonable assessment of their performance. In certain areas, such as athletic performance, which can be easily quantified, there is less self-delusion, the researchers said. But even in some cases in which the failure should seem obvious, the perpetrator is blithely unaware of the problem.
    This was especially tree in the area of logical reasoning, where research subjects—students at Cornell University, where the two researchers were based—often rated themselves highly even when they flubbed all questions in a reasoning test.
    Later, when the students were instructed in logical reasoning, they scored better on a test but rated themselves lower, having learned what constituted competence in this area.
    Grammar was another area in which objective knowledge was helpful in determining competence, but the more subjective area of humor posed different challenges, the researchers said.
    Participants were asked to rate how funny certain jokes were, and compare their responses with what an expert panel of comedians thought. On average, participants overestimated their sense of humor by about 16 percentage points.
    This might be thought of as the "above-average effect", the notion that most Americans would rate themselves as above average, a statistical impossibility.
    The researchers also conducted pilot studies of doctors and gun enthusiasts. The doctors overestimated how well they had performed on a test of medical diagnoses and the gun fanciers thought they knew more than they actually did about gun safety.
    So who should be trusted: The person who admits incompetence or the one who shows confidence? Neither, according to Dunning. "You can’t take them at their word. You’ve got to take a look at their performance," Dunning added.
The best title for the passage may be ______.
选项 A、The truly incompetent
B、incompetence vs. overestimate
C、incompetence vs. self-delusion
D、the American "above-average effect"
答案B
解析 文章的第1段谈到，真正无能的人从来不知道他们有多无能，第5段之后谈到美国和西欧国家的人对自己的能力都有一种不现实的估计(unrealistically sunny assessment of their own capabilities)，以后的各段举例说明了这一问题。作者在最后一段问道：So who should be trusted：The person who admits incompetence or the one who shows confidence? (应当信任哪一种人呢?是承认自己无
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