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Higher Social Classes Have an Exaggerated Belief That They Are More Capable

124 points by laurex 7y ago

codethief 7y ago
This reminds me of the studies by Paul Piff: https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research/are-wealthy-more-narcissistic https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research/are-wealthy-more-narcis... In particular, he demonstrated that in a rigged game of Monopoly, where one player e.g. starts off with more money than the others, that player will sooner or later demonstrate signs of feeling entitled and, in some cases, even attribute their victory at the end not to their initial advantage but to simply playing better than the other participants: https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_piff_does_money_make_you_mean https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_piff_does_money_make_you_mean
- rjf72 7y ago
  I'd again mention the ongoing replication crisis in psychology. People have specifically attempted to replicate Paul Piff's numerous studies trying to assign various negative characteristics to those of upper social class. The results did find some correlations maintained, such as those between greed and unethical behavior, but Piff's keystone correlation between social class and unethical behavior was completely unable to be replicated. I do not think people understand how bad of shape psychology is in right now, social psychology in particular. Social psychology replication studies tend to be hitting around 20%. For instance once again the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology comes up. It's interestingly enough the journal that published the study that this link is discussing, as well as the journal that Piff published in. Its current replication rate is 23%. [2] [1] - https://www.collabra.org/article/10.1525/collabra.166/ https://www.collabra.org/article/10.1525/collabra.166/ [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_replication_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_...
  - gerbilly 7y ago
    > I do not think people understand how bad of shape psychology is in right now, social psychology in particular. Social psychology replication studies tend to be hitting around 20%. Yes I think we do, at least on HN, because anytime any psychology study or result is mentioned at least two threads popup up citing the replication crisis. The thing is, it kind of depends on how you define replication, also some of these studies were done decades ago, society has changed since then, possibly affecting the results. How easy would it be to replicate the bystander apathy studies where people were in a smoke filled room after 9/11, for example?¹ It definitely should be taken into account, but it's much easier to tear down than to give a critical appraisal. I don't mean to criticize your comment in particular, because it was actually a good appraisal of this particular body of work. I do think HN has some biases² and the tendency to shout "replication crisis" in a self satisfied manner is one of the things that bug me the most about HN.³ 1: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1969-03938-001 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1969-03938-001 2: No politics, but in human affairs, everything is politics. 3: Especially since most of us on here are from the hard sciences, which ironically are easier because they deal in concrete, measurable phenomena.
    - TeMPOraL 7y ago
      > The thing is, it kind of depends on how you define replication, also some of these studies were done decades ago, society has changed since then, possibly affecting the results. If a study doesn't replicate because society has changed, and so the results, then that study cannot be used to infer things about current society. It belongs to historical studies at best, at worst it was garbage from the get-go (I suspect the latter is usually the case; human psychology seems mostly fixed). Yes, hard sciences are easier; the physical reality keeps you honest. But that only means soft sciences need even stricter standards than hard ones, whereas today the opposite is the case. There's little point in spending all this effort if almost all of it is wasted - we need to accept that psychology is hard, and meaningful results will be rare.
      - gerbilly 7y ago
        > If a study doesn't replicate because society has changed, and so the results, then that study cannot be used to infer things about current society. Not necessarily, again it depends what you mean by replication. For example in the case of the bystander apathy experiment where they used smoke, do you have to replicate the study exactly as it was done, i.e.: is smoke essential, or would some other sign of threat also do? This is why I chose that example, if right after 9/11 you tried to replicate that particular study in the US and used smoke, it probably wouldn't replicate, because people would have been recently and strongly primed to react to smoke as a threat. I think people are over-interpreting the replication failures sometimes.
        TeMPOraL 7y ago
        9/11 was an exceptional circumstance. You could try and replicate that study again, some time after it - e.g. now. If the study still won't replicate, that's evidence for it being bogus. Single replication failure isn't necessarily damning for a study, much less the entire field. But if most studies keep on not replicating, then you have a problem.
    - bloaf 7y ago
      One other thing to keep in mind about social psychology: http://www.spsp.org/news-center/blog/stereotype-accuracy-response http://www.spsp.org/news-center/blog/stereotype-accuracy-res... > Stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology. Richard et al (2003) found that fewer than 5% of all effects in social psychology exceeded r’s of .50. In contrast, nearly all consensual stereotype accuracy correlations and about half of all personal stereotype accuracy correlations exceed .50. That is, stereotypes are frequently better predictors of human behavior than bona-fide research in social psychology.
rjf72 7y ago
The paper that this article is discussing was published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. That's interesting for two reasons. The first is that it's a rather well regarded journal with a very high impact rate. The other is because it's one of the journals that's driving the ongoing replication crisis plaguing psychology. [1] In particular the journal this was published in was found to have an overall replication rate of 23%. Another way of putting this is that if you assumed the exact opposite of everything you read that was published in that journal (e.g. - what they claim is statistically significant, is not actually significant) you'd be vastly more informed than a person who took what was published in the journal at face value. Of course that does not mean that this study is 'false', but you should take it with the same degree of credulity that you'd take something published in a venue when you know 77% of what is published is false. I mention this largely because I think there's a substantial degree of dissonance between the crisis in psychology and people continuing to take studies in psychology at face value. It's illogical. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_replication_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_...
- nosianu 7y ago
  > if you assumed the exact opposite of everything you read that was published in that journal ... you'd be vastly more informed I don't think the opposite of not knowing is knowing (the opposite fact) :-) That said, I agree with your main point on an even wider level. I read such very general headlines and conclusions - and when I read the actual paper there is a very specific and very limited experiment, with very specific people in a very specific context. I'm always left wondering how one gets from such a specific thing to such generalizations, especially when it's about such a complex subject as human behavior where tiny variations can produce radically different outcomes. --- PS: Animats says it's paywalled, but the PDF on the linked page is accessible and has the data and details? About the N=150,949 part: > EFL collected the data from small-business owners at the time they were applying for a loan at a microfinance institution (MFI) in Mexico from 2015 to 2017. As part of the loan application process, a prospective borrower had to complete a short psychometric assessment developed by EFL. That's just what I said, it's very specific. > The psychometric assessment that EFL developed consists of many modules, one of which is relevant for the purposes of the present investigation: the flashcard game. The flashcard game is a cognitive test on memory and executive functioning. In the flashcard game, participants are presented with an image; after pressing a key, they are shown a second image. Participants are then asked to indicate whether the second image matches the first. The flashcard game is scored based on whether or not the participant correctly identifies a match. and > At the end of the flashcard exercise, participants saw a question that asked them to estimate how well they think they did on this particular exercise relative to other applicants.... This question was added to the psychometric application for the purpose of this study I don't know about others, but I have a hard time seeing such tests justifying the headlines.
DoreenMichele 7y ago
My son often talks of an animal, a dingo iirc, that wasn't socialized normally. Maybe it was orphaned and raised by humans? Dominance behaviors in the species are hard wired biologically, but submissive behavior was learned behavior, so the animal in question never learned things like how ho back down from a fight. So the animal stood its ground, even when outnumbered and so forth. It simply had no other option, having not ever learned any of the not hard wired behaviors necessary to do something else. It ended up in charge of the pack.
- mcguire 7y ago
  I believe the same thing happened at IBM in the 90s.
ericmcer 7y ago
We are just animals, if someone in a low social tier is constantly blocked and fed negative affirmations, while someone from a higher tier is constantly granted access and positive affirmations, one is being trained to feel more confident and capable. If they dropped me into a town with a bunch of actors who all pretended to be in awe of my intellect, I would begin to think of myself as some kind of genius.
- phkahler 7y ago
  And you might actually become smarter. Ones ability to do some things - including mental tasks - is affected by their beliefs about their ability. That's not to say you can do anything you believe you can, just that belief can influence (not determine) ability.
  - corodra 7y ago
    What you’re describing is the amazing benefit of both blind faith and confidence. There’s jokes about piano teachers teaching kids extremely difficult classical sheets and the kids nailing it. Then someone says “how do you get them to play such difficult music?” “Stfu, don’t tell them it’s difficult.” The older I get the more I realize most things are not difficult. I make them more difficult than they are. If you’re in an environment where someone encourages you that “you can nail this on the first or second try”, you probably will. Most of my work is me winging it. Especially when others fail. In things I really don’t have any civilized justifiable reason to even attempt. But I, I don’t know, just do things. Mostly with research. But yea. I started to find out, in the past... 5 years? ... that a lot of silver spoons feel the same way. They just do things. And it works for them because they don’t have the emotion of difficult or easy. That’s probably the lesson in all of this. Do things. Don’t worry about easy, difficult, credentials or sobriety.
    - rjf72 7y ago
      Chess is probably the clearest example of this. Chess is not especially difficulty to become quite strong at - even as an adult. But there is an important catch there. Your improvement is nonlinear and difficult to predict. You can spend 6 months working tirelessly at the game and see no improvement. One extremely typical pattern in it is 'stair stepping.' You don't gradually increase in proportion to your efforts, you instead go up in spikes. You wake up and suddenly you're e.g. 100 points stronger than you were than when you went to bed. This goes all the way to the top. Magnus Carlsen is currently the world champion, one of the most dominant we've had in a long time, and arguably the strongest player to ever live. And he had phenomenal success. He achieved his grandmaster title at age 13 and was nearly the youngest grandmaster ever. But here's [1] what's interesting. That's a graph of his rating progress - a much more readable table is at the bottom. Carlsen was advancing meteorically rapidly. Looking at his relative rating gains between each period: --- 10/2001: Baseline (2072) 10/2002: +178 10/2003: +200 10/2004: +131 Then, as always, it happens: 10/2005: -11 --- A player meteorically rising and spending immense amounts of energy on the game suddenly manages to achieve nothing but an 11 point loss over more than a year. Imagine if you, as an adult, were in the position and in spite of all your efforts over the past year - you did nothing but lose 11 points. I've coached people in that exact situation. And they tend to rapidly give up. Oh, they just don't have the IQ for it. Maybe they're too old. Maybe they're doing something wrong and start engaging in genuinely wrong study habits. And so on. These 'plateau' type events happen to literally all chess players. So it leads to the interesting thing that you'll find most chess players are both humble and arrogant. Humble as years of sport against much better players (as is required for improvement) will make you, but arrogant in the sense that they will never say never - even when things look incredibly grim. In effect you end up simultaneously humble and arrogant. I would expect that successful entrepreneurs and successful chess players share many of the exact same characteristics, as it's the same game in both endeavors. [1] - https://ratings.fide.com/id.phtml?event=1503014 https://ratings.fide.com/id.phtml?event=1503014
strken 7y ago
An exaggerated belief of performance in a flash card game might not indicate that belief is exaggerated in general. Maybe they have a heuristic like "I'm good at things" which gives a pretty accurate estimate of their performance on day-to-day tasks, and flash card games are an edge case that they're not good at estimating.
- Data_Junkie 7y ago
  Please. Money lies. We all know it. People with money are deferred to, emotionally coddled, and ALWAYS given the benefit of the doubt. It is literally the foundation of Western culture. Those who have always had it live in a very delusional world that has always lied to them about their abilities. That's how we end up with a " very stable genius" as the "leader" of the western world.
  - imnotlost 7y ago
    But the noble poor man (or the noble savage if we look to the past) never cheats, lies, steals, etc. And if they do it’s for survival or family or some other sympathetic cause. Or we’re all humans with normal human traits and egos to rationalize just about anything given the right circumstances.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - Data_Junkie 7y ago
      Nobody said they didn't. Point was that people with "old" money who have always been of a higher social class than most believe falsley that they are better than they are, for the previously stated reasons. Yes, they are humans, and that's what happens to humans who are given too much. One of the many horrid things that happens to normal humans.
  - strken 7y ago
    Yeah, money lies. Overestimating your ability on a memory retention task might not be indicative that money lies, however.
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ve55 7y ago
Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19991696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19991696 (two days ago). Keep in mind that the paper does clearly state: >Furthermore, all three forms of social class were positively associated with actual rank, indicating that those with relatively high social class did objectively better on the flashcard game relative to their lower-class counterparts This is a poor title and article if you take even a brief moment to view the actual correlations presented in the paper.
- mcguire 7y ago
  So, the belief isn't exaggerated? Makes sense; IQ is heritable.
  - ve55 7y ago
    At least in the first instance it looks like there's a minor overestimation, but it depends on what you're looking at. Quoting my comment from previous submission: The general effect still exists, yes. It's just reported on poorly in this instance. The 'relative overplacement' in the first table (the extent that participants over-estimated their own performance) is a correlation of 0.04, while the 'actual rank' is a correlation of 0.13, both in comparison to 'subjective social class'. There are a lot of correlations of higher magnitude than 0.04, so it's disappointing that the article attempts to focus on nothing else.
  - BariumBlue 7y ago
    I'd be more inclined to think that richer people spend more time and money on their kids - a kid constantly left at home with working parents is going to be worse off than with parents that are home and read to and interact with them
    - MaxBarraclough 7y ago
      > I'd be more inclined to think that richer people spend more time and money on their kids This article [0] says your generalisation is correct: > Middle-class and higher-income parents see their children as projects in need of careful cultivation [...] Working-class parents, meanwhile, believe their children will naturally thrive, and give them far greater independence and time for free play. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/upshot/rich-children-and-poor-ones-are-raised-very-differently.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/upshot/rich-children-and-...
throw2016 7y ago
There is a replication crisis [1] in the social sciences and most studies are not being replicated. [2] Here is a study that is not able to replicate the most referenced study on subsaharan and Africa iq [3]. The tests were done on uneducated people, handicapped people, people in remote areas and in poor conditions ie under trees which is not the recommended test procedure. Higher scores were also intentionally dumped in favour of poorer scores for vague reasons with evidence of data massaging. This kind of 'science' is extremely damaging especially when cherry picked results and sweeping conclusions that these kind of studies do not and cannot support are widely cited outside the scientific context by bigots and racists to construct a narrative that dehumanize others. The nobel laurette James Watson expressed 'gloom about Africa' on the basis of these studies. There are a lot of well known funds like the pioneer fund [1] and volker fund that have spent tens of decades on 'race' science and that formed a lot of basis for Charles Murray's bell curve. There are not hundreds of heavily funded organizations in Africa and Asia trying to prove others are somehow lower iq or 'inferior'. This effort has been ongoing for over 250 years, first it was brain size and now its iq and evolutionary psychology. What exactly is iq measuring, can we measure something that we don't understand? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis [2] https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/8/27/17761466/psychology-replication-crisis-nature-social-science https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/8/27/17761466/ps... [3] http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/wicherts2010.pdf http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/wicherts2010.... [4] https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Pioneer_Fund https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Pioneer_Fund
candybar 7y ago
The methodology seems highly questionable. From the actual study (https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-pspi0000187.pdf https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-pspi0000187.p...) "Social class was measured in three ways. To indicate subjective social class, participants saw an image of a ladder that 'represents where people stand in your country.' and selected the rung on which they felt they stood, relative to other people in their country" "However, when difference scores were used (or the alternative joint-testing procedure), the conclusions were not so straightforward. Here, we found support for Hypothesis 1 only in the case of subjective social class. The difference score approach also showed that education and income were negatively associated with overconfidence, directly contrasting the results generated by the residual score approach." So it's not so much that people from a higher social class are overconfident but that overconfident people appear to be from a higher social class due to their methodology and downstream assessment confirms their methodological bias. It's quite incredible this received as much attention as it did. Also this sample is limited to Mexican small-business owners applying for loans.
- deogeo 7y ago
  > It's quite incredible this received as much attention as it did. Almost any piece of western media tries to paint higher classes negatively, so no, it's the opposite of incredible.
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124 points by laurex 7y ago

This reminds me of the studies by Paul Piff: https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research/are-wealthy-more-narcissistic https://matrix.berkeley.edu/research/are-wealthy-more-narcis... In particular, he demonstrated that in a rigged game of Monopoly, where one player e.g. starts off with more money than the others, that player will sooner or later demonstrate signs of feeling entitled and, in some cases, even attribute their victory at the end not to their initial advantage but to simply playing better than the other participants: https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_piff_does_money_make_you_mean https://www.ted.com/talks/paul_piff_does_money_make_you_mean

rjf72 7y ago
I'd again mention the ongoing replication crisis in psychology. People have specifically attempted to replicate Paul Piff's numerous studies trying to assign various negative characteristics to those of upper social class. The results did find some correlations maintained, such as those between greed and unethical behavior, but Piff's keystone correlation between social class and unethical behavior was completely unable to be replicated. I do not think people understand how bad of shape psychology is in right now, social psychology in particular. Social psychology replication studies tend to be hitting around 20%. For instance once again the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology comes up. It's interestingly enough the journal that published the study that this link is discussing, as well as the journal that Piff published in. Its current replication rate is 23%. [2] [1] - https://www.collabra.org/article/10.1525/collabra.166/ https://www.collabra.org/article/10.1525/collabra.166/ [2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_replication_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_...
- gerbilly 7y ago
  > I do not think people understand how bad of shape psychology is in right now, social psychology in particular. Social psychology replication studies tend to be hitting around 20%. Yes I think we do, at least on HN, because anytime any psychology study or result is mentioned at least two threads popup up citing the replication crisis. The thing is, it kind of depends on how you define replication, also some of these studies were done decades ago, society has changed since then, possibly affecting the results. How easy would it be to replicate the bystander apathy studies where people were in a smoke filled room after 9/11, for example?¹ It definitely should be taken into account, but it's much easier to tear down than to give a critical appraisal. I don't mean to criticize your comment in particular, because it was actually a good appraisal of this particular body of work. I do think HN has some biases² and the tendency to shout "replication crisis" in a self satisfied manner is one of the things that bug me the most about HN.³ 1: https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1969-03938-001 https://psycnet.apa.org/record/1969-03938-001 2: No politics, but in human affairs, everything is politics. 3: Especially since most of us on here are from the hard sciences, which ironically are easier because they deal in concrete, measurable phenomena.
  - TeMPOraL 7y ago
    > The thing is, it kind of depends on how you define replication, also some of these studies were done decades ago, society has changed since then, possibly affecting the results. If a study doesn't replicate because society has changed, and so the results, then that study cannot be used to infer things about current society. It belongs to historical studies at best, at worst it was garbage from the get-go (I suspect the latter is usually the case; human psychology seems mostly fixed). Yes, hard sciences are easier; the physical reality keeps you honest. But that only means soft sciences need even stricter standards than hard ones, whereas today the opposite is the case. There's little point in spending all this effort if almost all of it is wasted - we need to accept that psychology is hard, and meaningful results will be rare.
    - gerbilly 7y ago
      > If a study doesn't replicate because society has changed, and so the results, then that study cannot be used to infer things about current society. Not necessarily, again it depends what you mean by replication. For example in the case of the bystander apathy experiment where they used smoke, do you have to replicate the study exactly as it was done, i.e.: is smoke essential, or would some other sign of threat also do? This is why I chose that example, if right after 9/11 you tried to replicate that particular study in the US and used smoke, it probably wouldn't replicate, because people would have been recently and strongly primed to react to smoke as a threat. I think people are over-interpreting the replication failures sometimes.
      - TeMPOraL 7y ago
        9/11 was an exceptional circumstance. You could try and replicate that study again, some time after it - e.g. now. If the study still won't replicate, that's evidence for it being bogus. Single replication failure isn't necessarily damning for a study, much less the entire field. But if most studies keep on not replicating, then you have a problem.
  - bloaf 7y ago
    One other thing to keep in mind about social psychology: http://www.spsp.org/news-center/blog/stereotype-accuracy-response http://www.spsp.org/news-center/blog/stereotype-accuracy-res... > Stereotype accuracy is one of the largest and most replicable effects in all of social psychology. Richard et al (2003) found that fewer than 5% of all effects in social psychology exceeded r’s of .50. In contrast, nearly all consensual stereotype accuracy correlations and about half of all personal stereotype accuracy correlations exceed .50. That is, stereotypes are frequently better predictors of human behavior than bona-fide research in social psychology.

rjf72 7y ago

The paper that this article is discussing was published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. That's interesting for two reasons. The first is that it's a rather well regarded journal with a very high impact rate. The other is because it's one of the journals that's driving the ongoing replication crisis plaguing psychology. [1] In particular the journal this was published in was found to have an overall replication rate of 23%. Another way of putting this is that if you assumed the exact opposite of everything you read that was published in that journal (e.g. - what they claim is statistically significant, is not actually significant) you'd be vastly more informed than a person who took what was published in the journal at face value. Of course that does not mean that this study is 'false', but you should take it with the same degree of credulity that you'd take something published in a venue when you know 77% of what is published is false. I mention this largely because I think there's a substantial degree of dissonance between the crisis in psychology and people continuing to take studies in psychology at face value. It's illogical. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_replication_rates https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis#Psychology_...

nosianu 7y ago
> if you assumed the exact opposite of everything you read that was published in that journal ... you'd be vastly more informed I don't think the opposite of not knowing is knowing (the opposite fact) :-) That said, I agree with your main point on an even wider level. I read such very general headlines and conclusions - and when I read the actual paper there is a very specific and very limited experiment, with very specific people in a very specific context. I'm always left wondering how one gets from such a specific thing to such generalizations, especially when it's about such a complex subject as human behavior where tiny variations can produce radically different outcomes. --- PS: Animats says it's paywalled, but the PDF on the linked page is accessible and has the data and details? About the N=150,949 part: > EFL collected the data from small-business owners at the time they were applying for a loan at a microfinance institution (MFI) in Mexico from 2015 to 2017. As part of the loan application process, a prospective borrower had to complete a short psychometric assessment developed by EFL. That's just what I said, it's very specific. > The psychometric assessment that EFL developed consists of many modules, one of which is relevant for the purposes of the present investigation: the flashcard game. The flashcard game is a cognitive test on memory and executive functioning. In the flashcard game, participants are presented with an image; after pressing a key, they are shown a second image. Participants are then asked to indicate whether the second image matches the first. The flashcard game is scored based on whether or not the participant correctly identifies a match. and > At the end of the flashcard exercise, participants saw a question that asked them to estimate how well they think they did on this particular exercise relative to other applicants.... This question was added to the psychometric application for the purpose of this study I don't know about others, but I have a hard time seeing such tests justifying the headlines.

DoreenMichele 7y ago

My son often talks of an animal, a dingo iirc, that wasn't socialized normally. Maybe it was orphaned and raised by humans? Dominance behaviors in the species are hard wired biologically, but submissive behavior was learned behavior, so the animal in question never learned things like how ho back down from a fight. So the animal stood its ground, even when outnumbered and so forth. It simply had no other option, having not ever learned any of the not hard wired behaviors necessary to do something else. It ended up in charge of the pack.

mcguire 7y ago
I believe the same thing happened at IBM in the 90s.

ericmcer 7y ago

We are just animals, if someone in a low social tier is constantly blocked and fed negative affirmations, while someone from a higher tier is constantly granted access and positive affirmations, one is being trained to feel more confident and capable. If they dropped me into a town with a bunch of actors who all pretended to be in awe of my intellect, I would begin to think of myself as some kind of genius.

phkahler 7y ago
And you might actually become smarter. Ones ability to do some things - including mental tasks - is affected by their beliefs about their ability. That's not to say you can do anything you believe you can, just that belief can influence (not determine) ability.
- corodra 7y ago
  What you’re describing is the amazing benefit of both blind faith and confidence. There’s jokes about piano teachers teaching kids extremely difficult classical sheets and the kids nailing it. Then someone says “how do you get them to play such difficult music?” “Stfu, don’t tell them it’s difficult.” The older I get the more I realize most things are not difficult. I make them more difficult than they are. If you’re in an environment where someone encourages you that “you can nail this on the first or second try”, you probably will. Most of my work is me winging it. Especially when others fail. In things I really don’t have any civilized justifiable reason to even attempt. But I, I don’t know, just do things. Mostly with research. But yea. I started to find out, in the past... 5 years? ... that a lot of silver spoons feel the same way. They just do things. And it works for them because they don’t have the emotion of difficult or easy. That’s probably the lesson in all of this. Do things. Don’t worry about easy, difficult, credentials or sobriety.
  - rjf72 7y ago
    Chess is probably the clearest example of this. Chess is not especially difficulty to become quite strong at - even as an adult. But there is an important catch there. Your improvement is nonlinear and difficult to predict. You can spend 6 months working tirelessly at the game and see no improvement. One extremely typical pattern in it is 'stair stepping.' You don't gradually increase in proportion to your efforts, you instead go up in spikes. You wake up and suddenly you're e.g. 100 points stronger than you were than when you went to bed. This goes all the way to the top. Magnus Carlsen is currently the world champion, one of the most dominant we've had in a long time, and arguably the strongest player to ever live. And he had phenomenal success. He achieved his grandmaster title at age 13 and was nearly the youngest grandmaster ever. But here's [1] what's interesting. That's a graph of his rating progress - a much more readable table is at the bottom. Carlsen was advancing meteorically rapidly. Looking at his relative rating gains between each period: --- 10/2001: Baseline (2072) 10/2002: +178 10/2003: +200 10/2004: +131 Then, as always, it happens: 10/2005: -11 --- A player meteorically rising and spending immense amounts of energy on the game suddenly manages to achieve nothing but an 11 point loss over more than a year. Imagine if you, as an adult, were in the position and in spite of all your efforts over the past year - you did nothing but lose 11 points. I've coached people in that exact situation. And they tend to rapidly give up. Oh, they just don't have the IQ for it. Maybe they're too old. Maybe they're doing something wrong and start engaging in genuinely wrong study habits. And so on. These 'plateau' type events happen to literally all chess players. So it leads to the interesting thing that you'll find most chess players are both humble and arrogant. Humble as years of sport against much better players (as is required for improvement) will make you, but arrogant in the sense that they will never say never - even when things look incredibly grim. In effect you end up simultaneously humble and arrogant. I would expect that successful entrepreneurs and successful chess players share many of the exact same characteristics, as it's the same game in both endeavors. [1] - https://ratings.fide.com/id.phtml?event=1503014 https://ratings.fide.com/id.phtml?event=1503014

strken 7y ago

An exaggerated belief of performance in a flash card game might not indicate that belief is exaggerated in general. Maybe they have a heuristic like "I'm good at things" which gives a pretty accurate estimate of their performance on day-to-day tasks, and flash card games are an edge case that they're not good at estimating.

Data_Junkie 7y ago
Please. Money lies. We all know it. People with money are deferred to, emotionally coddled, and ALWAYS given the benefit of the doubt. It is literally the foundation of Western culture. Those who have always had it live in a very delusional world that has always lied to them about their abilities. That's how we end up with a " very stable genius" as the "leader" of the western world.
- imnotlost 7y ago
  But the noble poor man (or the noble savage if we look to the past) never cheats, lies, steals, etc. And if they do it’s for survival or family or some other sympathetic cause. Or we’re all humans with normal human traits and egos to rationalize just about anything given the right circumstances.
  - deleted 7y ago
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  - Data_Junkie 7y ago
    Nobody said they didn't. Point was that people with "old" money who have always been of a higher social class than most believe falsley that they are better than they are, for the previously stated reasons. Yes, they are humans, and that's what happens to humans who are given too much. One of the many horrid things that happens to normal humans.
- strken 7y ago
  Yeah, money lies. Overestimating your ability on a memory retention task might not be indicative that money lies, however.

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ve55 7y ago

Duplicate of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19991696 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19991696 (two days ago). Keep in mind that the paper does clearly state: >Furthermore, all three forms of social class were positively associated with actual rank, indicating that those with relatively high social class did objectively better on the flashcard game relative to their lower-class counterparts This is a poor title and article if you take even a brief moment to view the actual correlations presented in the paper.

mcguire 7y ago
So, the belief isn't exaggerated? Makes sense; IQ is heritable.
- ve55 7y ago
  At least in the first instance it looks like there's a minor overestimation, but it depends on what you're looking at. Quoting my comment from previous submission: The general effect still exists, yes. It's just reported on poorly in this instance. The 'relative overplacement' in the first table (the extent that participants over-estimated their own performance) is a correlation of 0.04, while the 'actual rank' is a correlation of 0.13, both in comparison to 'subjective social class'. There are a lot of correlations of higher magnitude than 0.04, so it's disappointing that the article attempts to focus on nothing else.
- BariumBlue 7y ago
  I'd be more inclined to think that richer people spend more time and money on their kids - a kid constantly left at home with working parents is going to be worse off than with parents that are home and read to and interact with them
  - MaxBarraclough 7y ago
    > I'd be more inclined to think that richer people spend more time and money on their kids This article [0] says your generalisation is correct: > Middle-class and higher-income parents see their children as projects in need of careful cultivation [...] Working-class parents, meanwhile, believe their children will naturally thrive, and give them far greater independence and time for free play. [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/upshot/rich-children-and-poor-ones-are-raised-very-differently.html https://www.nytimes.com/2015/12/18/upshot/rich-children-and-...

throw2016 7y ago

There is a replication crisis [1] in the social sciences and most studies are not being replicated. [2] Here is a study that is not able to replicate the most referenced study on subsaharan and Africa iq [3]. The tests were done on uneducated people, handicapped people, people in remote areas and in poor conditions ie under trees which is not the recommended test procedure. Higher scores were also intentionally dumped in favour of poorer scores for vague reasons with evidence of data massaging. This kind of 'science' is extremely damaging especially when cherry picked results and sweeping conclusions that these kind of studies do not and cannot support are widely cited outside the scientific context by bigots and racists to construct a narrative that dehumanize others. The nobel laurette James Watson expressed 'gloom about Africa' on the basis of these studies. There are a lot of well known funds like the pioneer fund [1] and volker fund that have spent tens of decades on 'race' science and that formed a lot of basis for Charles Murray's bell curve. There are not hundreds of heavily funded organizations in Africa and Asia trying to prove others are somehow lower iq or 'inferior'. This effort has been ongoing for over 250 years, first it was brain size and now its iq and evolutionary psychology. What exactly is iq measuring, can we measure something that we don't understand? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis [2] https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/8/27/17761466/psychology-replication-crisis-nature-social-science https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/8/27/17761466/ps... [3] http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/wicherts2010.pdf http://www.iapsych.com/iqmr/fe/LinkedDocuments/wicherts2010.... [4] https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Pioneer_Fund https://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Pioneer_Fund

candybar 7y ago

The methodology seems highly questionable. From the actual study (https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-pspi0000187.pdf https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/psp-pspi0000187.p...) "Social class was measured in three ways. To indicate subjective social class, participants saw an image of a ladder that 'represents where people stand in your country.' and selected the rung on which they felt they stood, relative to other people in their country" "However, when difference scores were used (or the alternative joint-testing procedure), the conclusions were not so straightforward. Here, we found support for Hypothesis 1 only in the case of subjective social class. The difference score approach also showed that education and income were negatively associated with overconfidence, directly contrasting the results generated by the residual score approach." So it's not so much that people from a higher social class are overconfident but that overconfident people appear to be from a higher social class due to their methodology and downstream assessment confirms their methodological bias. It's quite incredible this received as much attention as it did. Also this sample is limited to Mexican small-business owners applying for loans.

deogeo 7y ago
> It's quite incredible this received as much attention as it did. Almost any piece of western media tries to paint higher classes negatively, so no, it's the opposite of incredible.

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