Ed Nuhfer, California State University (Retired)
Rachel Watson, University of Wyoming
Cinzia Cervato, Iowa State University
Ami Wangeline, Laramie County Community College

Being in the majority carries the privilege of empowerment to set the norms for acceptable beliefs. Minority status for any group invites marginalization by the majority simply because the group appears different from the familiar majority. Here, we explore why this survival mechanism (bias) also operates when a majority perceives an idea as different and potentially threatening established norms.

Young adult learners achieve comfort in ways of thinking and explaining the world from their experiences obtained during acculturation. Our Introduction stressed how these experiences differ in the majority and minority cultures and produce measurable effects. Education disrupts established states of comfort by introducing ideas that force reexaminations that contradict earlier beliefs established from experiences.

Even the kind of college training that promotes only growing cognitive expertise is disruptive but more critical; research verifies that the disruptions are felt. While discovering the stages of intellectual development, William Perry Jr. found that, for some learners, the feelings experienced during transitions toward certain higher stages of thinking were so discomforting that the students ceased trying to learn and withdrew. Currently, about a third of first-year college students drop out before their sophomore year.

Educating for self-assessment accuracy to gain control over bias

We believe that the same survival mechanisms that promote prejudice and suppress empathizing and understanding different demographic groups also cripple understanding in encounters with unfamiliar or contrarian ideas. In moments that introduce ideas disruptive to beliefs or norms, unfamiliar ideas become analogous to unfamiliar groups—easily marginalized and thoughtlessly devalued in snap judgments. Practice in doing self-assessment when new learning surprises us should be valuable for gaining control over the mechanism that triggers our own polarizing bias.

Earlier (Part 2 entry on bias), we recommended teaching students to frequently self-assess, “What am I feeling that I want to be true, and why do I have that feeling?” That assignment ensures that students encounter disruptive surprises mindfully by becoming aware of affective feelings involved in triggering their bias. Awareness gives the greater control over self needed to prevent being captured by a reflex to reject unfamiliar ideas out of hand or to marginalize those who are different.

Teaching by employing self-assessment routinely for educating provides the prolonged relevant practice with feedback required for understanding self. Educating for self-assessment accuracy constitutes a change from training students to “know stuff” to educating students to know how they can think to understand both “stuff” and self.

When the first encounter with something or someone produces apprehension, those who gain a capacity for self-assessment accuracy from practice can exercise more control over their learning through recognizing the feeling that accompanies incipient activation of bias in reaction to discomfort. Such self-awareness allows a pause for reflecting on whether enlisting this vestigial survival mechanism serves understanding and can prevent bias from terminating our learning and inducing us to speak or act in ways that do not serve to understand.

Affect, metacognition, and self-assessment: minority views of contrarian scholars

We address three areas of scholarship relevant to this guest-edited series to show how brain survival mechanisms act to marginalize ideas that contradict an established majority consensus.

Our first example area involves the marginalization of the importance of affect by the majority of behavioral scientists. Antonio Damasio (1999, p. 39) briefly described this collective marginalization:

“There would have been good reason to expect that, as the new century started, the expanding brain sciences would make emotion part of their agenda…. But that…never came to pass. …Twentieth Century science…moved emotion back into the brain, but relegated it to the lower neural strata associated with ancestors whom no one worshipped. In the end, not only was emotion not rational, even studying it was probably not rational.“

A past entry in Improve with Metacognition (IwM) also noted the chilling prejudice against valuing affect during the 20th Century. Benjamin Bloom’s Taxonomy of the Affective Domain (Krathwohl et al. 1964) received an underwhelming reception from educators who had given unprecedented accolades to the team’s earlier volume on Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain (Bloom, 1956). Also noted in that entry was William G. Perry’s purposeful avoidance of referring to affect in his landmark book on intellectual and ethical development (Perry, 1999). The Taxonomy of the Affective Domain also describes a developmental model that maps onto the Perry model of development much better than Bloom’s Taxonomy of the Cognitive Domain.

Our second example involved resistance against valuing metacognition. Dunlosky and Metcalfe (2009) traced this resistence to French philosopher Auguste Comte (1798-1854), who held that an observer trying to observe self was engaged in an impossible task like an eye trying to see itself by looking inwardly. In the 20th Century, the behaviorist school of psychology gave new life to Comte’s views by professing that individuals’ ability to do metacognition, if such an ability existed, held little value. According to Dunlosky and Metcalfe (2009, p. 20), the behaviorists held “…a stranglehold on psychology for nearly 40 years….” until the mid-1970s, when the work of John Flavell (see Flavell, 1979) made the term and concept of metacognition acceptable in academic circles.

Our third example area involves people’s ability to self-assess. “The Dunning-Kruger effect” holds that most people habitually overestimate their competence, with those least competent holding the most overly inflated views of their abilities and those with real expertise revealing more humility by consistently underestimating their abilities by modest amounts. Belief in “the effect” permeated many disciplines and became popular among the general public. As of this writing, a Google search brought up 1.5 million hits for the “Dunning Kruger effect.” It still constitutes the majority view of American behavioral scientists about human self-assessment, even after recent work revealed that the original mathematical arguments for “the effect” were untenable. 

Living a scholars’ minority experience

Considering prejudice against people and bias against new ideas as manifestations of a common, innate survival mechanism obviates fragmentation of these into separate problems addressed through unrelated educational approaches. Perceiving that all biases are related makes evident that the tendency to marginalize a new idea will certainly marginalize the proponents of an idea.

Seeing all bias as related through a common mechanism supports using metacognition, particularly self-assessment, for gaining personal awareness and control over the thoughts and feelings produced as the survival mechanism starts to trigger them. Thus, every learning experience providing discomfort in every subject offers an opportunity for self-assessment practice to gain conscious control over the instinct to react with bias. 

Some of the current blog series authors experienced firsthand the need for higher education professionals to acquire such control. When publishing early primary research in the early 1990s, we were naively unaware of majority consensus, had not yet considered bias as a survival reaction, and we had not anticipated marginalization. Suggesting frequent self-assessments as worthwhile teaching practices in the peer-reviewed literature brought reactions that jolted us from complacency into a new awareness.

Scholars around the nation, several of them other authors of this blog series, read the guest editor’s early work, introduced self-assessment in classes and launched self-assessment research of their own. Soon after, many of us discovered disparagements at the departmental, college, and university levels, and even at professional meetings followed for doing so. Some disparagements led to damaged careers and work environments.

The bias imparted by marginalization led to our doubting ourselves. Our feelings for a time were like those of the non-binary gender group presented in the earlier Figure 1 in the previous Part 1 on privilege: We “knew our stuff,” but our feelings of competence in our knowledge lagged. Thanks to the feedback from the journal peer-reviewers of Numeracy, we now live with less doubt in ourselves. For those of us who weathered the storm, we emerged with greater empathy for minority status and minority feelings and greater valuing of self-assessment. 

Self-assessment, a type of metacognition employing affect, seems in a paradigm change that recapitulates the history of affect and metacognition. Our Numeracy articles have achieved over 10,000 downloads, and psychologists in Europe, Asia, and Australia now openly question “the effect” (Magnus and Peresetsky, 2021; Kramer et al., 2022; Hofer et al., 2022; Gignac, 2022) in psychology journals. The Office of Science and Society at McGill University in Canada reached out to the lay public (Jarry, 2020) to warn how new findings require reevaluating “the effect.” We recently discovered that paired measures could even unearth unanticipated stress indicators among students (view section at time 21.38 to 24.58) during the turbulent times of COVID and civil disruption.

Takeaways

Accepting teaching self-assessment as good practice for educating and self-assessment measures as valid assessments open avenues for research that are indeed rational to study. After one perceives bias as having a common source, developing self-assessment accuracy seems a way to gain control over personal bias that triggers hostility against people and ideas that are not threatening, just different. 

“Accept the person you are speaking with as someone who has done amazing things” is an outstanding practice stressed at the University of Wyoming’s LAMP program. Consciously setting one’s cognition and affect to that practice erases all opportunities for marking anyone or their ideas for inferiority.

References

Bloom, B.S. (Ed.). (1956). Taxonomy of educational objectives, handbook 1: Cognitive domain. New York, NY: Longman.

Damasio, A. (1999). The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness. New York: Harcourt.

Flavell, J. H. (1979). Metacognition and cognitive monitoring: a new area of cognitive-developmental inquiry. American Psychologist 34, 906-911.

Gignac, Gilles E. (2022). The association between objective and subjective financial literacy: Failure to observe the Dunning-Kruger effect. Personality and Individual Differences 184: 111224. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2021.111224

Hofer, G., Mraulak, V., Grinschgl, S., & Neubauer, A.C. (2022). Less-Intelligent and Unaware? Accuracy and Dunning–Kruger Effects for Self-Estimates of Different Aspects of Intelligence. Journal of Intelligence, 10(1). https://doi.org/10.3390/jintelligence10010010

Kramer, R. S. S., Gous, G., Mireku, M. O., & Ward, R. (2022). Metacognition during unfamiliar face matching. British Journal of Psychology, 00, 1– 22. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjop.12553

Krathwohl, D.R., Bloom, B.S. and Masia, B.B. (1964) Taxonomy of Educational Objectives: The Affective Domain. New York: McKay.

Magnus, Jan R., and Peresetsky, A. (October 04, 2021). A statistical explanation of the Dunning-Kruger effect. Tinbergen Institute Discussion Paper 2021-092/III, http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3951845

Nicholas-Moon, Kali. (2018). “Examining Science Literacy Levels and Self-Assessment Ability of University of Wyoming Students in Surveyed Science Courses Using the Science Literacy Concept Inventory with Expanded Inclusive Demographics.” Master’s thesis, University of Wyoming.

Perry, W. G. Jr. (1999). Forms of Ethical and Intellectual Development in the College Years. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass (a reprint of the original 1968 work with minor updating).

Tarricone, P. (2011). The Taxonomy of Metacognition (1st ed.). Psychology Press. 288p. https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203830529