Human cognitive neuroscience seminar

Speaker: Dr Rob McIntosh

Topic: Psychophysical analysis of self-monitoring

Abstract: There is a popular idea, stemming from the psychological literature, that people who are bad at certain tasks tend to think that they are much more successful than they are, while people who are good at them have a more realistic appraisal of their own abilities. This appealing notion - sometimes reduced to the soundbite-sized idea that stupid people don't know they are stupid - has been spread enthusiastically by mass media and bloggers, but is the source of considerable scepticism within psychology itself. We have been running a series of studies to determine, in a more rigorous psychophysical way, whether good and poor performers systematically differ in their self-monitoring ability, and their tendency to over- or under-estimation. I have no idea whether we have been successful or not, but I hope to be able to provide a better appraisal by the time of this seminar.