Asian Scientist (Feb. 12, 2014) – Dr Shu Li from the Chinese Academy of Sciences has won the annual Wiley-IPCAS prize for excellence in Chinese psychological science. The prize, awarded for Li’s research into overconfidence, was presented at the opening ceremony of the annual academic conference of the Chinese Psychological Society in Nanjing.
The Wiley-IPCAS prize, valued at $5,000, is awarded by Wiley in partnership with the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences (IPCAS), China’s national psychology research institute.
The prize is awarded to the best article written by Chinese or China-based researchers publishing in PsyCh Journal or Acta Psychologica Sinica each year. Shu Li, from the Key Laboratory of Behavioral Science at the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, published his winning paper in PsyCh Journal, China’s first international psychology journal.
Shu Li’s research used peer-comparison studies to explore methods for evaluating and understanding overconfidence; defined as a positive difference between confidence and accuracy. The existence of overconfidence remains a controversial issue within psychological research, and a precise method of evaluating it is essential for researchers to validate their findings.
In one of three studies, Li’s team analyzed the perceptions of 126 sophomore students from Jilin University. The students were asked to consider their likely exam results compared to their peers and to estimate the percentage of students who would be more successful than them.
These estimations were later compared to the students’ actual exam results, to examine how accurate their self-perception had been. The male participants overestimated their ability level by an average of 11.8%.
This study was supplemented with two further experiments, considering both students and job seekers, to find that participants who had a higher peer-comparison overconfidence level were more likely to overestimate their performance.
The article can be found at: Bi YL et al. (2012) Peer-Comparison Overconfidence: Does It Measure Bias In Self-Evaluation?
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Source: John Wiley and Sons.
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