Why do young children overestimate their task performance? A cross-cultural experiment

Abstract

Young children are generally overconfident in their abilities and performances, but the reasons that underlie such self-overestimation are unclear. The current cross-cultural experiment aimed to address this issue, testing the possibility that young children's overconfidence in task performance is, at least in part, motivated. We tested 89 Chinese children (49 % girls) and 104 Dutch children (50 % girls) aged 4 and 5 years and asked them to estimate how well they would perform on both a motor test and a memory task. They were randomly assigned to either an experimental condition (in which they were promised a reward for providing accurate performance estimates) or a no-incentive control condition, and then they performed the task. The incentive lowered Chinese (but not Dutch) children's performance overestimation on the motor task. Unexpectedly, children did not overestimate their performance on the memory task. Thus, this study supports the view that young children's self-overestimation can be motivated (rather than due to cognitive immaturity alone) but also reveals task contingencies and cultural differences.

Keywords: Cognitive immaturity; Cross-cultural comparison; Motivation; Overestimation.