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  3. The truly incompetent may never know the depths of their own incompetence, a pair of social psychologists said on Thursday.

The truly incompetent may never know the depths of their own incompetence, a pair of social psychologists said on Thursday.

admin2010-04-30  54
问题     The truly incompetent may never know the depths of their own incompetence, a pair of social psychologists said on Thursday.
    "We found again and again that people who perform poorly relative to their peers tended to think that they did rather well," Justin Kruger, co-author of a study on the subject, said in a telephone interview.
    Kruger and co-author David Dunning found that when it came to a variety of skills—logical reasoning, grammar, even sense of humor—people who essentially were inept never realized it, while those who had some ability were self-critical.
    It had little to do with innate modesty, Kruger said, but rather with a central paradox: Incompetents lack the basic skills to evaluate their performance realistically. Once they get those skills, they know where they stand, even if that is at the bottom.
    Americans and Western Europeans especially had an unrealistically sunny assessment of their own capabilities, Dunning said by telephone in a separate interview, while Japanese and Koreans tended to give a reasonable assessment of their performance. In certain areas, such as athletic performance, which can be easily quantified, there is less self-delusion, the researchers said. But even in some cases in which the failure should seem obvious, the perpetrator is blithely unaware of the problem.
    This was especially tree in the area of logical reasoning, where research subjects—students at Cornell University, where the two researchers were based—often rated themselves highly even when they flubbed all questions in a reasoning test.
    Later, when the students were instructed in logical reasoning, they scored better on a test but rated themselves lower, having learned what constituted competence in this area.
    Grammar was another area in which objective knowledge was helpful in determining competence, but the more subjective area of humor posed different challenges, the researchers said.
    Participants were asked to rate how funny certain jokes were, and compare their responses with what an expert panel of comedians thought. On average, participants overestimated their sense of humor by about 16 percentage points.
    This might be thought of as the "above-average effect", the notion that most Americans would rate themselves as above average, a statistical impossibility.
    The researchers also conducted pilot studies of doctors and gun enthusiasts. The doctors overestimated how well they had performed on a test of medical diagnoses and the gun fanciers thought they knew more than they actually did about gun safety.
    So who should be trusted: The person who admits incompetence or the one who shows confidence? Neither, according to Dunning. "You can’t take them at their word. You’ve got to take a look at their performance," Dunning added.
Which of the following statement is NOT true, according to the passage?
选项 A、Students at Cornell University often rated themselves highly even when they flubbed all questions in a reasoning test.
B、Grammar was an area in which objective knowledge was helpful in determining competence.
C、Participants in the test estimated their sense of humor by about 16 percentage points.
D、Students scored better on a logical reasoning test but rated themselves lower.
答案C
解析 参阅文章第6、7、8段。这几段中谈到，康奈尔大学的学生即使他们在逻辑测试中把所有问题都答得一团糟，也经常对自己评价很高。而后来在上了逻辑推理课后，这些学生的测试成绩很好，而他们的自我评价却不高了，因为他们了解了组成逻辑推理能力的因素。语法是另一种帮助确定能力的客观知识，但是研究者认为幽默这一更主观的领域提出了不同的挑战。根据这几段的内容可知，A、B和D都是原文内容，故本题正确答案为C。
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