CET-6 Listening Passages: The Dunning–Kruger Effect and the IKEA Effect

Passage One.

Have you ever met someone who was confident and completely wrong?

Psychologists have a name for this.

In 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger tested students at Cornell University.

The tests covered grammar, logical reasoning and even humour.

Afterwards, the students guessed how well they had done compared with others.

Those with the lowest scores believed they had done better than most of their classmates!

The reason is simple, and a little uncomfortable.

The skills you need to do a task well are the same skills you need to spot your mistakes.

Interestingly, the best students slightly underestimated themselves.

Questions nine to eleven are based on the passage you have just heard.

Question nine. What did the students do after the tests?

Question ten. What did the researchers find about the students with the lowest scores?

Question eleven. Why do unskilled people fail to see their mistakes?

Passage Two.

Why does a shelf you built yourself feel so special, even if it's a little crooked?

In 2012, Michael Norton and his colleagues published a study on exactly this.

They asked people to put together simple storage boxes from flat-pack furniture.

Afterwards, the builders were willing to pay much more for their own box

than other people would pay for an identical box that was already built.

The researchers called it the IKEA effect.

They found the same thing with origami.

People valued their own clumsy paper birds almost as much as an expert's work.

But there was one condition: the task had to be finished.

When people left the job unfinished, the effect disappeared.

Questions twelve to fifteen are based on the passage you have just heard.

Question twelve. What did the people in the study build?

Question thirteen. How did the builders value their own boxes?

Question fourteen. What did the researchers find with origami?

Question fifteen. When did the IKEA effect disappear?

So be careful how much you trust your own confidence,

and how much you love your own bookshelf!