A recent foray into the riches of e-learning research has led to a fascinating article. Here, the researcher cleverly examined the popularity of particular researchers based on a number of factors (their links to other professionals, their visibility, and their professional affiliations) to see if that might lead to any distortions in self-estimation—in terms of estimating how many articles they had published in the past three years (measured against the actual objective number of publications).

Enhanced Selves

People experience all sorts of biases in their assessments of themselves and their own situations. Witness observations are notoriously poor; human memories are famously corruptible. And ego gets in the way of so many types of perceptions.

This researcher found that those who credit their prominence to their own internal efforts tended to over-estimate their productivity. Those who credit their stature to external circumstances (like whacked-out counting methods and distant colleagues who claim to be close collaborators—I’m speculating) tend to under-estimated their contributions.

So What?

Researchers who are too self-referential and focused on the self may risk mis-focusing and missing the point of more than their views of themselves. Research itself is a highly sensitive thing that requires a lot of hard work, analysis, and pursuing opportunities for disproving one’s own hypotheses and evidences.

So much of Internet reputation is smoke and mirrors, digital chimera.

Anyway, this research, which is at least a decade-and-a-half old, still strikes me as very informative about human nature and our state-of-being.