Dr Mariana Veiga Chetto Coutinho
I earned my Ph.D. in Cognitive Psychology from the University at Buffalo, SUNY and completed a six-month postdoctoral research fellowship at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. In August of 2022, I joined the department of Cognitive Sciences at UAEU as an assistant professor. Before that, I worked at Zayed University for a period of 7 years. I am passionate about teaching and research. I am enthusiastic to help students learn and strengthen their critical thinking skills. With regard to research, I am interested in finding out more about the causes of overconfidence. Particularly, my research seeks to answer four main questions: (1) Why do people have poor insights about how well they know and do not know? (2) Why do low performers show greater levels of miscalibration when judging their performance? (3) How does critical thinking affect the accuracy of metacognitive judgments? (4) What are the most effective methods to strengthen metacognitive capacities and reduce overconfidence during learning? My research explores these questions within the context of memory and reasoning tasks.
Intellectual Humility Reduces Overestimation in a Matrix Reasoning Task
Intellectual humility (IH)—the recognition of the limits and fallibility of one’s knowledge—has the potential to enhance the accuracy of metacognitive judgments of performance. While prior studies have explored IH's role in reducing overconfidence in cognitive tasks, their results have been mixed, probably due to differences in how IH is measured. The present study examined the relationship between IH and overestimation using the Comprehensive Intellectual Humility Scale (CIHS), which includes four dimensions: Independence of Intellect and Ego, Openness to Revising One’s Viewpoint, Respect for Others’ Viewpoints, and Lack of Intellectual Overconfidence. We also aimed to identify which aspect of IH most strongly predicts overestimation. A convenience sample of 209 participants residing in the United Arab Emirates completed the CIHS and a matrix reasoning test, and subsequently were asked to estimate their performance on the test. The results showed that IH was negatively associated with overestimation, and the strongest predictors of reduced overestimation were Respect for Others' Viewpoints and Lack of Intellectual Overconfidence. These findings have practical implications for education, as highlight the importance of helping students develop awareness of the limits of their own knowledge.