Flawed self-assessment: Implications for health, education, and the workplace

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