Learning More Than You Can Know: Introductory Education Produces Overly Expansive Self-Assessments of Knowledge

Education is a primary engine for gaining knowledge, yet it is unclear if introductory education helps learners gain meta-knowledge, that is, an accurate awareness of the scope and limits of their knowledge. We found that after taking an introductory finance class, relative to a control class, students overclaimed more knowledge they did not have, that is, endorsed more familiarity with bogus finance terms and expressed more confidence under incentives in their ability to answer questions about these terms. This finding was replicated in a Psychology and Law class, compared with a control class, with overclaiming still elevated two years later. In two follow-up experiments, participants in a hypothetical consulting context were randomly assigned to introductory training on GPS or a control topic. Participants in the GPS condition overclaimed more knowledge of bogus GPS terms and were more confident in their knowledge of real material never covered in the training, controlling for test performance. These effects were explained by introductory education both increasing self-perceived expertise in the education domain and creating basic schematic understanding that accommodates plausible but incorrect interpretations of unknown content. Introductory education, then, does not necessarily improve learners’ skills at identifying lack of knowledge. Rather, it can lead to an illusion of knowledge for unknown material, causing learners to overestimate their “circle of competence.”

This paper was accepted by George Wu, behavioral economics and decision analysis.

Funding: This work was supported in part by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education at the University of Wisconsin–Madison with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, awarded to S. Atir, and by the John Templeton Foundation, Thrive Center [Cognitive Habits of Intellectual Humility], awarded to D. Dunning.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix and data files are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2023.02244.