阅读理解
By now you've probably
heard about the "you're not special" speech, when English teacher
David McCullough told graduating seniors at Wellesley High School: "Do not
get the idea you're anything special, because you're not." Mothers and
fathers present at the ceremony — and a whole lot of other parents across the
Internet — took issue with McCullough's ego-puncturing words. But lost in the
uproar was something we really should be taking to heart: our young people
actually have no idea whether they're particularly talented or accomplished or
not. In our eagerness to elevate their self-esteem, we forgot to teach them how
to realistically assess their own abilities, a crucial requirement for getting
better at anything from math to music to sports. In fact, it's not just
privileged high-school students: we all tend to view ourselves as above
average.
Such inflated
self-judgments have been found in study after study, and it's often exactly
when we're least competent at a given task that we rate our performance most
generously. In a 2006 study published in the journal Medical Education, for
example, medical students who scored the lowest on an essay test were the most
charitable in their self-evaluations, while high-scoring students judged
themselves much more strictly. Poor students, the authors note, "lack
insight" into their own inadequacy. Why should this be? Another study, led
by Cornell University psychologist David Dunning, offers an enlightening
explanation. People who are incompetent, he writes with coauthor Justin Kruger,
suffer from a "dual burden": they're not good at what they do, and
their very incapability prevents them from recognizing how bad they are.
In Dunning and Kruger's
study, subjects scoring at the bottom of the heap on tests of logic, grammar
and humor "extremely overestimated" their talents. What these
individuals lacked (in addition to clear logic, proper grammar and a sense of
humor) was "metacognitive skill": the capacity to monitor how well
they're performing. In the absence of that capacity, the subjects arrived at an
overly hopeful view of their own abilities. There's a paradox here, the authors
note: "The skills that lead to competence in a particular domain are often
the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that domain." In
other words, to get better at judging how well we're doing at an activity, we
have to get better at the activity itself.
There are a couple of ways
out of this double bind. First, we can learn to make honest comparisons with
others. Train yourself to recognize excellence, even when you yourself don't
possess it, and compare what you can do against what truly excellent
individuals are able to accomplish. Second, seek out feedback that is frequent,
accurate and specific. Find a critic who will tell you not only how poorly you're
doing, but just what it is that you're doing wrong. As Dunning and Kruger note,
success indicates to us that everything went right, but failure is more
ambiguous: any number of things could have gone wrong. Use this external
feedback to figure out exactly where and when you screwed up.
If we adopt these
strategies — and most importantly, teach them to our children — they won't need
parents, or a commencement (毕业典礼) speaker, to tell them
that they're special. They'll already know that they are, or have a plan to get
that way.
