Joyce Ehrlinger

Why People Fail to Recognize Their Own Incompetence

Successful negotiation of everyday life would seem to require people to possess insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills. However, people tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence. This lack of awareness arises because poor performers are doubly cursed: Their lack of skill deprives them not only of the ability to produce correct responses, but also of the expertise necessary to surmise that they are not producing them. People base their perceptions of performance, in part, on their preconceived notions about their skills. Because these notions often do not correlate with objective performance, they can lead people to make judgments about their performance that have little to do with actual accomplishment.

High trait self-control predicts positive health behaviors and success in weight loss

Surprisingly few studies have explored the intuitive connection between self-control and weight loss. We tracked participants’ diet, exercise and weight loss during a 12-week weight loss program. Participants higher in self-control weighed less and reported exercising more than their lower self-control counterparts at baseline. Independent of baseline differences, individuals high in dispositional self-control ate fewer calories overall and fewer calories from fat, burned marginally more calories through exercise, and lost more weight during the program than did those lower in self-control. These data suggest that trait self-control is, indeed, an important predictor of health behaviors.

Where’s the Emotion? How Sport Psychology Can Inform Research on Emotion in Human Factors

Objective: The aim of this study was to demonstrate how research on emotion in sport psychology might inform the field of human factors. Background: Human factors historically has paid little attention to the role of emotion within the research on human-system relations. The theories, methods, and practices related to research on emotion within sport psychology might be informative for human factors because fundamentally, sport psychology and human factors are applied fields concerned with enhancing performance in complex, real-world domains. Method: Reviews of three areas of theory and research on emotion in sport psychology are presented, and the relevancy of each area for human factors is proposed: (a) emotional preparation and regulation for performance, (b) an emotional trait explanation for risk taking in sport, and (c) the link between emotion and motor behavior. Finally, there are suggestions for how to continue cross-talk between human factors and sport psychology about research on emotion and related topics in the future. Results: The relevance of theory and research on emotion in sport psychology for human factors is demonstrated. Conclusion: The human factors field and, in particular, research on human-system relations may benefit from a consideration of theory and research on emotion in sport psychology. Application: Theories, methods, and practices from sport psychology might be applied usefully to human factors.

Focalism and the Failure to Foresee Unintended Consequences

From drug policy to environmental initiatives, well-intentioned actions have often led to dramatic unintended consequences. The present research demonstrates that individuals focus on what is intended in a way that leads them to not sufficiently consider important unintended consequences. Participants fail to sufficiently weight the unintended consequences of attempts to satisfy preferences in a computer simulation (Study 1). Focus on intended consequences, and the resulting error in prediction, is reduced when the interrelatedness of variables within a system is highlighted (Studies 2 and 3). This research can inform means of improving predictions within complex systems.

Unrecognized Changes in the Self Contribute to Exaggerated Judgments of External Decline

People commonly perceive social conditions as declining. We propose that perceptions of social decline are often a consequence of a bias whereby people mistake change in themselves for change in the world. The present research demonstrates that common personal changes such as the parenthood transition (Studies 1–2) and physical aging (Study 3) may increase a persons sensitivity to dangers and thereby contribute to an illusory perception that external dangers are increasing. We use experimental models of the hypothesized change processes to test whether these common personal changes may contribute to judgments of social decline.