Comments on: Academic Insecurity Builds Character

By: yami

yami — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 13:25:00 +0000

Fifth-grade boys are tiny monsters. But so are many fifth-grade girls… so it must be the teachers’ fault!

By: LDH

LDH — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 11:04:00 +0000

I was a statistical consultant on a developmental psych study a few years back where that same overconfidence/gender interaction re: cognitive tasks was even found in kindergarteners and 1st graders (!) — interestingly though, it wasn’t found in the pre-K kids, which (of course, of course) is why we blamed the teachers (insert good-natured grin of the son of a retired elementary-school teacher *here*…)

By: John Vidale

John Vidale — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 09:44:00 +0000

Sounds plausible. On your side of this argument, having a daughter in fifth grade has certainly put me in favor of criminalizing the type of behavior that I often see in fifth grade boys.

By: yami

yami — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 04:26:00 +0000

Well, there’s a difference between overconfidence and egomania - as I see it egomania involves a certain amount of ignoring other people’s contributions as well as thinking highly of one’s own. But what I’m thinking of, specifically, are studies that have shown that men/white people/”the advantaged” are statistically more likely to overestimate their ability relative to objective measures of performance. I didn’t mean to imply that any conclusions could be drawn about individuals!
I really need to maintain a better bibliography if I’m going to keep using this blog as a feminist soapbox, but here’s one such study: on a variety of simple tests (general knowledge quizzes, guessing the length of a line, etc), men and women are found to perform more or less equally, but men expressed a higher level of confidence in their performance and therefore made less accurate predictions of their results.

By: John Vidale

John Vidale — Thu, 02 Jun 2005 03:00:00 +0000

“propping up the idea that insecurity is a sign of inability merely discourages those whose self-assessment isn’t systematically overoptimistic, i.e., women and minorities.”
Not sure that I like the category in which this places people like me - as I read it, systematically egotistical. Well, maybe I am. But not all the non-woman and non-minorities are egomaniacs.
John