It Pays to Think You’re Good at Math, Even If You Aren’t

New York Magazine:

People, as a general rule, aren’t good at gauging their own abilities and tend to overrate them — it’s a finding that comes up again and again in psychological research, to the point where there’s a name for overconfidence among untalented people:the Dunning-Kruger effect. New research extends this subject to an area of perpetual anxiety for a lot of people — math — and adds an interesting silver lining.

For the paper, published recently in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Ellen Peters of Ohio State and Par Bjalkebring of the University of Gothenburg studied a group of college students, testing them on both their math skills (objective numeracy) and perception of their math skills (subjective numeracy).

People weren’t very accurate at self-assessing their math skills: A third of the people who said they thought they were good at math scored in the bottom half of an objective math quiz. Slightly more surprising, about a fifth of the people who said they thought they were bad at math scored in the top half of the test, lending a sliver of hope to the math-phobic everywhere.

Read the whole story: New York Magazine