How Can You Tell If You're Going to Succeed or Land the Position?

This week was a challenging one for me at work. I was reading the folders of truly well qualified applicants to our doctoral program in clinical psychology here at Notre Dame. My assessment was that about 50 of them would be such excellent picks -- they are really outstanding, well-trained, high-GRE-scoring individuals. And yet only a handful were even offered interviews for the positions we have in the doctoral program.

The rest of these 50 well-qualiifed applicants must be scratching their heads wondering how someone as great as they are (and I agree!) could not even land an interview. Well, the answer is simple: They are great, and the competition is really, really great.

What's interesting is that Paul Windschitl and his colleagues at the University of Iowa set up some competitions, including a game of poker, among college students to see how well they could anticipate their rate of success at these competitions (1). It turns out that they tended to focus on their own skill level, rather than the skill of their competitors, when estimating their likelihood of winning. In reality, a much better predictor of their success was the skill level of their competitors.

So the bottom line is that whenever you are in a competition with others and you want to know your likelihood of success, try to assess how strong or weak your competitors are. It will be tempting just to focus on how good you are, but your success typically depends more on the competition.

Reference

(1) Windschitl, P. D., Kruger, J. & Simms, E. N. (2003). The influence of egocentrism and focalism on people's optimism in competitions: When what affects us equally affects me more. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 85, 389-408.

This post comes verbatim from Anita Kelly's Clever Student blog at TheCleverStudent.com

The photo is from visualphotos.com