Don’t Be A Dunning-Kruger
Why incompetent people think they know it all
“It is impossible for a man to learn what he thinks he already knows.” — Epictetus. With this quote, this remarkable stoic philosopher let us know the importance of our behavior towards knowledge and how this affects our development as professionals. We wish all people had the same vision of life as Epictetus, but we all know that’s not even close to being real.
Twitter, for example, is full of non-professional experts in every single topic. A person spends a day reading about politics on Wikipedia and then wakes up with the confidence to argue and debate with people that have spent their life studying about it. It is interesting, and yet surprising, that most of the people in our surroundings understand they are above the average, or that they deserve to be recognised due to their skills. Have you thought about what happens inside those people’s heads?
There is something called cognitive bias that is a systematic error in thinking that occurs when people are processing and interpreting information in the world around them and affects the decisions and judgments they make; cognitive biasses are, in fact, a subjective social reality. This psychological effect produces a deviation in mental processing, leading to distortion or illogical interpretation of the information given. There are approximately 53 cognitive biasses, but there is one in specific that fits the kind of people we talked about before, and it is called The Dunning-Kruger Effect. In this article, I will elaborate on this effect, what it is, and how not to fall into this practice.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a type of cognitive bias on which people consider they are cleverer and more capable than they actually are. It consists of the error of overestimating one’s own cognitive and intellectual capacity; it is closely correlated to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority. The mixture of poor self-awareness and low cognitive ability leads them to overestimate their capabilities.
This bias derives from the inability to recognize one’s lack of competence, education, and expertise. If one does not have satisfactory awareness of oneself and the meta-cognitive processes, one is unable to objectively quantify one’s incompetence. According to David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the psychologists that named this bias, “The cognitive bias of illusory superiority results from an internal illusion that occurs in people with low cognitive ability and by an external misunderstanding in trained people.”
People are typically overly confident when evaluating the quality of their performance on intellectual and social situations. But particularly poor performers are extremely over-estimating their ability, and it is because their incompetence does not allow them to develop the skills necessary to recognize their deficits. As Charles Darwin wrote in his book The Descent of Man, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”
It is important to highlight that this cognitive bias is gender-neutral and can affect people of all ages; from that family member who loves to correct everybody in every topic, to that “friend” that uses fancy words and believes everyone else’s opinion is useless, un-enlightened, and wrong.
Interestingly, research has found that people with high performance and intellect do not tend to overestimate themselves, in fact, quite the opposite, they tend to rank themselves below their performance; for realizing one does not know anything, one needs to know something. On the contrary, people who show low performance often do not accept criticism or do not show interest in self-improvement. At the end of the day, people (whether they are highly-skilled or inept) often have an inaccurate self-perception; when they are ignorant they cannot see their own flaws, but when they are exceptionally talented, they do not perceive how unusual their talents are.
How not to fall into the Dunning-Kruger Effect
At some point in our life, we have all assumed we know things we later realised we did not, and that is totally ok. We all make mistakes and our opinions and preconceptions are like a wall, hard to overthrow. What is essential is to be aware of our acts and do some practices that will reduce the risk of slipping into the Dunning-Kruger effect. These are the four basic practices to do:
- Know thyself. This short but powerful quote by Socrates is deeper than it might seem to be; it implies recognizing your talent but also understanding your weaknesses. Having a talent does not make you immaculate or irrefutable, it means that you have the cognitive skills to develop ideas and concepts easier than people who do not have this specific talent. Concurrently, understanding your weaknesses will allow you to discover new fields to work on. For doing so, it is important to get to know and interact with people that are specialists in those areas.
- Value and internalize criticism. Ask other people how you’re doing and for constructive criticism/feedback. Nobody likes to be corrected or criticised, but unfortunately for many, this is essential for growth and to reinforce our abilities. It might be challenging to hear, but feedback can render valuable insights into how others perceive your abilities.
- Never stop learning. If there’s a quality every highly-skilled person has is their vehement desire for knowledge. Try your best to be unassuming; this does not mean you are going to fake humility, but that you’re not going to assume you know everything about a topic and you are going to stop digging about it. The more you learn about something, the easier it is to realise how much there is to learn still.
- Question your knowledge. It is easy to surround yourself with pleasers and just look for information that enforces you believes or opinions, but what is going to challenge your intellect is looking for information that contradicts what you previously believed. There is another cognitive bias called Survivorship Bias, which is the logical error of concentrating on the people or things that made it past some selection process and overlooking those that did not, typically because of their lack of visibility. This can lead to false conclusions in several different ways. Therefore, before making any judgments based on observation, let's consider the things we are not observing. Question yourself, give yourself a huge challenge and work for growing.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is one of the most common and annoying biasses, that influences the way people behave, think, and make decisions. It is easy to find people with this cognitive bias, but have we analysed ourselves? I hope this article helps you to identify if you have some tendencies that can lead to falling into this bias.
The hallmark of intelligence, according to Dunning, is being “good at knowing what we do not know”; therefore it must be our main goal to develop this level of self-awareness and to be smart enough to know when we are wrong. I’m going to finish with these words “The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, is the illusion of knowledge”.
