hyperpape wrote:...
I've never read the research in question, but it's not so hard to test. One way is to give objective tests of some sort and compare self-evaluation vs. actual performance. I know some studies on self-evaluation work this way. Another way is to use statistics: if optimists think they're in the 75% percentile on average, then they are almost certainly wrong, as a group.
Luckily, you don't have to come up with a complete measure of realism, just a few handy tests.
I see. Of the two methods you mention, I prefer comparing self-evaluation to actual performance, since particular individuals could very well be in the 75th percentile on average. Anyway, I don't feel like "realism" is limited to self-evaluation, so maybe such a test could be extended to evaluation of any particular area, compared to actual results in a particular area. For example, I suppose if somebody has a particular evaluation on what will happen when the government does X, their evaluation could be compared to the actual result of X when it happens to get a measure for how realistic a person is in their evaluation.
If we use this as a method of quantifying realism, though, it seems to me that people might be deemed as "realists" depending on the subject matter. For example, if I know a lot about the weather, I can potentially better predict the weather, and be a "realist" when it comes to weather predictions, while perhaps being far from a realist when it comes to predicting other things, such as how well a basketball team will do this season. On the other hand, if I know a lot about basketball, I might be better at predicting that than the weather.
Without doing any particular study, I'd guess that it'd be intuitive to hypothesize that "those that know enough about X are realists when it comes to X", at least compared to the general public. Coming back to the example you've provided, if one knows well about oneself, perhaps one can be more of a realist when evaluating one's abilities.
Maybe we can accept this measure of realism, and say that a realist is one that knows more about a particular area of study. Then, if we say in general, a realist is slightly depressed, from earlier posts, can we guess that this could lead to the assumption that "those that know more about a particular area become slightly depressed"?
Perhaps, as they say, "ignorance is bliss".
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) If you ask people to assess their ability in some field they tend to overestimate their ability unless they are competent enough to know how incompetent they are. (I have noticed this online with go. People who brag about their go ability are predictably weak, for instance.)
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