Premium
Intelligence, gender, and assessment method affect the accuracy of self‐estimated intelligence
Author(s) -
Stumm Sophie
Publication year - 2014
Publication title -
british journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.536
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8295
pISSN - 0007-1269
DOI - 10.1111/bjop.12031
Subject(s) - psychology , intelligence quotient , developmental psychology , distortion (music) , affect (linguistics) , cognition , psychiatry , communication , amplifier , cmos , electronic engineering , engineering
Self‐estimates of intelligence ( SEI ), which influence to what extent people engage in and how well they perform at a task, are subject to distortion. Here, the distortion effects of individual differences in intelligence ( IQ ), gender, and proximal (with reference to test performance) and distal (with reference to IQ score distributions) assessments of SEI were tested in a sample of 200 British adults. The results showed that (1) people with lower IQ misestimated their SEI to a greater extent than people with high IQ ; (2) this effect was more pronounced in distal than proximal measures of SEI ; (3) SEI means did not differ significantly across gender but the IQ ‐related level of SEI distortion did; (4) this effect was greater for distal than proximal measurement; and (5) proximal SEI were on average less distorted than distal SEI scores and also correlated more closely with IQ . Overall, the findings suggest that the distal SEI assessment method resulted in greater gender‐ and IQ ‐related distortions of SEI .