It’s Not As Easy as You Think: The Illusion of Skill Acquisition

What would be the easiest way to begin learning a skill? By reading about it? Hearing about it? What about watching others perform it?

In a preregistered survey conducted by Kardas and O’Brien (2018), watching others was reported to be the first-sought and most-used learning aid, perceived as the most available, easiest to process, and most effective. However, people typically cannot master new skills through sight alone. Rather, skills are acquired by doing, through practice.

When people repeatedly watch others perform the skill before ever attempting the skill themselves, they may overestimate the degree to which they can perform the skill, in what can be called an illusion of skill acquisition (Kardas & O’Brien, 2018).

The results of the study support this hypothesis and reveal that repeated watching does not improve immediate abilities, despite predictions otherwise. It was also found that when viewers could track the specific steps of others’ performances while watching, they felt like they could perform the skill themselves. The viewers take the information at face value and fail to incorporate how the actions translate into the moment of “doing”, which consequently leads to the inaccurate self-assessment of ability. In other words, the experiential gap between observing and doing may sometimes lead to an illusion of skill acquisition.

This study is important because of its relevance to the link between observation and learning. Although observation is commonly seen as beneficial for learning, these results suggest that people should take into consideration the unforeseen consequence of a possible overestimation of ability when learning new skills. Being overconfident and readily relying on your own abilities in the place of an expert’s may not be the wisest decision.

So, you’d better think twice before attempting that Triple Axel even you believe that: “It can’t be that hard, right? Right?”

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Source:

• Kardas, M., & O’Brien, E. (2018). Easier seen than done: Merely watching others perform can foster an illusion of skill acquisition. Psychological Science. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797617740646