Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Self-assessment, or the evaluation of one’s ability on a task, is widely perceived as a fundamental skill, yet in most studies, people are found to be poorly calibrated to their own abilities. Some results seem to show poorer calibration for low perform- ers than for high performers. This effect has been explained in multiple ways: it could indicate worse metacognitive abil- ity among the low performers (the “Dunning-Kruger” effect), or simply regression to the mean. To tease apart these expla- nations we develop a Bayesian model of self-assessment and evaluate its predictions in two experiments. Our results suggest that poor self-assessment is caused by the influence of prior be- liefs and imperfect skill at determining whether a problem was solved correctly or not, and offer only weak support for of a relationship between metacognitive ability and performance.