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Bias Blind Spot and Murphy's Law


Madeline Nagel is a recent graduate who majored in Psychology and Chinese Language and Literature. She was awarded a Fall 2016 Independent Grant which he used to conduct research on cognitive bias under Dr. Scott Lilienfeld.

This semester was a lesson in Murphy’s Law as it applies to research: Everything that can go wrong, will. However, it has also been an incredible opportunity to learn how to overcome anything the world can throw at me.



My proposed project was a study of how psychopathic and narcissistic personality traits might influence one’s knowledge of one’s own cognitive biases. As one might be able to guess, these maladaptive personality traits encompass a certain level of grandiosity and interpersonal dysfunction that are often related to a general lack of insight about their shortcomings. In simpler terms, narcissistic or psychopathic traits might be related to an inability to accurately understand oneself, one’s abilities and how others may see them. If this is the case, that may pose a huge problem for the field of personality research, as it relies heavily on participants reporting on their own personality traits!

The project is part of a larger dissertation project which will compare community members’ self-reported personality traits to close friends’ and family members’ reports. In addition, we will have participants do a number of other tasks, including several tests of “bias blind spot” or one’s ability to reflect on their own biases. In one such task, participants are told about a cognitive bias (such as confirmation bias) and are asked how much they think a) others suffer from this bias and b) they themselves suffer from it. The disconnect between being able to identify bias in others and in oneself is bias blind spot. We hypothesized that personality disorder traits would exacerbate the disconnect. 

Originally, the plan was to have participants running by early November, but Murphy’s Law took effect. IRB approval for the larger project was postponed due to a number of small concerns, but the project was finally approved in October. In October, we began collecting pilot data to test several measures which are essential to the larger study. Despite getting an excellent number of responses, the new measures did not correlate as well as expected with other measures of the same constructs, meaning that they were too unreliable to use moving forward. The last few weeks have been devoted to designing new measures.

The majority of this semester has therefore been devoted to delving into the literature on metacognition and personality in order to keep the project moving forward from a writeup perspective, as well as working on the other major projects in the lab. My days have been spent reviewing the literature for new projects, working on my Honors thesis, editing manuscripts to get them ready for publication, and reading everything I can get my hands on. What makes working in research fun is the fact that there are always new questions. So, while the work has been slow to get started on the metacognition project, other manuscripts have been submitted to journals and my first paper (also a project supported by SIRE) has gotten a request for a “Revise and Resubmit” by an outstanding journal.

Truly, it’s impossible to get bored working in a psychology lab. The moment a paper is submitted or a project hits a snag, there are a hundred new questions to pursue, a thousand interesting ideas to consider. I can’t wait for winter break because it means free time to sit back and read the pile of articles I’ve been squirrelling away all semester. Come spring, I’m beyond excited to get participants into the lab to start work on the metacognition project. Do psychopaths and narcissists suffer from exceptionally large bias blind spot? I still don’t know, but I can’t wait to find out.

Visit the Undergraduate Research Programs website to learn more about applying for Independent Research Grants.

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