Validity of Self-Assessment: A Field Evaluation

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1983

Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 2008

People's impressions of the quality of their performances are often surprisingly inaccurate. In this paper, I discuss three specific factors that contribute to error in self-assessment. First, at a most basic level, individuals must possess a certain level of knowledge to simply distinguish weak from strong performances. Thus, a lack of skill can contribute to erroneous self-assessments. Second, even those who possess skill might rely on the wrong information to evaluate their performances. I discuss how relying on preexisting self-views can lead estimates of one's performance astray. Third, I discuss how motivational forces can play an indirect role in overconfidence. In particular, theories of intelligence that inspire people to think well of themselves also inspire behaviors that contribute to overconfident impressions of how well one has performed on a task. Finally, I discuss how we can draw on this research to improve accuracy in self-assessments.

European Journal of Personality, 2010

Self-reports of behaviour have been criticized as fraught with problems that seriously undermine the construct validity of conventional personality measures. The problems are related to a putative absence of, or distortion of, a person's knowledge about himself or herself. A proposed solution is to use peer reports of personality instead, because such observer ratings are presumably more impartial and free of the distorting influences affecting self-reports. We review some past research on moderators of the agreement between self-reports and peer ratings of personality, arguing that those findings support the validity of self-ratings. We conclude that peer ratings, although highly useful as adjuncts to other methods of assessment, are no substitute for self-reports as a source of personality information.

2004

SUMMARY—Research from numerous corners of psycho-logical inquiry suggests that self-assessments of skill and character are often flawed in substantive and systematic ways.We review empirical findings on the imperfect nature of self-assessment and discuss implications for three real-world domains: health, education, and the workplace. In general, people’s self-views hold only a tenuous to modest relationship with their actual behavior and per-formance. The correlation between self-ratings of skill and actual performance in many domains is moderate to mea-ger—indeed, at times, other people’s predictions of a per-son’s outcomes prove more accurate than that person’s self-predictions. In addition, people overrate themselves. On average, people say that they are ‘‘above average’ ’ in skill (a conclusion that defies statistical possibility), over-

Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 2010

Harkins, White, & Utman (2000) found that when there is the potential for evaluation by an external source (i.e., the experimenter) and the self, concern over the potential for external evaluation superseded interest in the potential for selfevaluation. In the present research, we found that when ego involvement was increased, the potential for self-evaluation produced the same level of performance as did the potential for experimenter evaluation (Experiment 1). However, in Experiment 2, we found that even when ego involvement was high, concern over the potential for external evaluation superseded interest in self-evaluation. This research extends the range of conditions under which the potential for external evaluation has been shown to be more potent than the potential for self-evaluation.j asp_630 1579..1604 Although many factors may affect the amount of effort a person devotes to his or her performance on a given task, an important determinant of motivation is whether or not the person's performance is subject to evaluation. In the current work, we focus on the role that the potential for evaluation plays in producing the goal-setting effect, the finding that giving participants specific, difficult goals leads to better performance than does instructing participants to do their best (Locke & Latham, 1990a, 1990b, 2002, 2006). By evaluation, we refer to a judgment of the quality or amount of the person's output on the given task. For evaluation to be possible, a potential agent of evaluation must have access to some measure of this output and a criterion against which the output can be compared. This criterion can be social (e.g., a goal based on the performance of previous participants), objective (e.g., the score one would achieve if all the problems were solved), or personal (e.g., the person's own previous level of performance). The agent of evaluation can be the person himself or herself (i.e., self-evaluation) or some other person or persons (i.e., social evaluation). In the case of goal setting, the

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1995

The social loafing paradigm was used to test the contribution of self-evaluation to goal-setting effects. If, as E. Locke and G. Latham (1990) argued, goals lead to improved performance because they serve as standards for self-evaluation, eliminating the opportunity for experimenter evaluation should not reduce performance. Results suggest that when the goal is seen as informative, the prospect of selfevaluation may contribute to goal-setting effects. However, the results also suggest that when goals are seen as too stringent or too lenient, it is concern over evaluation by an external source, not self, that motivates performance. Implications of these findings for E. Locke and G. Latham's (1990) theory of goal setting and general theories of self-evaluation are discussed. The self-evaluation process plays a central role in many social psychological theories. By self-evaluation, we refer to the process described in the first hypothesis of Festinger's (1954) theory of social comparison, which states: "There exists, in the human organism, a drive to evaluate his [sic] opinions and abilities" (p. 117). According to Festinger, this drive exists because "the holding of incorrect opinions and/or inaccurate appraisals of one's abilities can be punishing or even fatal in many situations" (p. 117). In his second hypothesis, Festinger went on to note that in those cases where objective, nonsocial means of self-evaluation exist, they will be used, but in the many cases in which they do not exist, people evaluate their opinions and abilities through social comparison. Although no longer considered a drive, the notion that interest in self-evaluation motivates social comparison processes continues to play an important role in current theorizing (e.g., Goethals & Darley, 1987; Suls & Wills, 1991). For our purposes, the key feature of this self-evaluation process is the suggestion that people can be motivated by the opportunity to compare their opinions or abilities against some sort of evaluative criterion. In Festinger's (1954) original version, the purpose of this comparison was to gain self-knowledge. In their revision of social comparison theory, Goethals and Darley (1987) argued that the concern for self-validation is also important. That

Journal of Personality and Social …, 2002

2007

Online Submission, 2012

Defining self assessment as the involvement of students in identifying standards and/or criteria to apply to their work and making judgements about the extent to which they have met these criteria and standards, this paper seeks to highlight the gestalt effect of self assessment. The total effect of self assessment on the learner is greater than the sum of the individual effects of self assessment. A Posttest-Only Control-Group Experimental Design was used for the conduct of a comprehensive study, with self assessment training as the experimental variable and the posttest as the results of the external examinations. Both treatment groups were selected from the same high schools, with the design duplicated across the 10 schools, controlling for socioeconomic status and other school variables that might otherwise influence differences between the treatment groups. Students reported feeling less threatened by other so-called superior students. The paper uses empirical evidence from the comprehensive study which showed that high school students trained in self assessment skills outperformed their untrained counterparts in external examinations in all areas of the school curriculum. This summary is hoped to bring changes to current practice and provoke much needed research in this field.

Personality and Social Psychology Review

We conceptualize self-concept as a self-organizing dynamical system and investigate implications ofthisperspectivefor the dynamic andfixed-point attractor tendencies of self-evaluative thought. Participants who differed in self-concept valence (self-esteem) and coherence (self-certainty, self-stability) engaged in verbal self-reflection for several minutes, then used a computer mouse to track the moment-to-moment self-evaluation expressed in their recorded narrative. Prior to self-reflection, participants recalled positive or negative past actions (positive vs. negative priming), or did not recall past actions (no priming). Priming affected overall self-evaluation (i.e., greatest positivity underpositive priming), but only early in the narrative. The effects ofself-concept, in contrast, became stronger over time. Self esteem affected overall self-evaluation, whereas self-certainty and self-stability affected the dynamic properties (e.g., rate of movement between self-evaluative states) and attractor tendencies ofself-evaluation. Discussion centers on the interplay between structure anddynamics in the self-system.