The Dunning-Kruger Effect
Is it just me?
Your first day at a new job is the second most stressful day you will have. It doesn’t matter what that job is, your progress through your career, or even if anybody noticed what transpired.
The story is the same for virtually everyone, so I’m sure you know exactly what I mean. It’s that tight knot in the base of your stomach as you walk up to the door for the first time, and it’s the nervous sweat as you wait for your new boss to come get you from the front desk. It’s your awkward inability to hear any questions people ask before they repeat it at least once. It’s also the massive weight that settles over you when you leave that first day crippled with the confidence that tomorrow will shine light on all of today’s mistakes.
However, if you’re like most people, the second day is easier. You know where to go with your shiny new access card. You have a laptop and an email now. You’re even getting invited to events to start getting your feet under you. You start being a little more confident that you can handle what the day throws your way. The next day, that feeling gets stronger. And the next. And the next.
Your expertise grows and grows and grows…until the rug is pulled out from under you.
This is the second universal experience: the moment that your understanding and experience finally reach their next crest. This is the moment where you realize that you didn’t actually know all that much after all and where you finally see how much there is left to learn.
But don’t give up yet.
You’ve simply found yourself in the Valley of Despair. Not a melodramatic literary device. Not a late 90s grunge-core band. Simply one stop on the journey through the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Dunning and Kruger
In 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger released a study entitled “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.”
This study was inspired by the 1995 case of McArthur Wheeler. Mr. Wheeler robbed two Pittsburgh banks on the same day in 1995. He did so in broad daylight and without a mask. That night, his face was on the evening news. By the next morning, he was in prison.
“But I wore the juice….” he said.
When officers confronted him with the security footage from the bank, Mr. Wheeler was shocked. “But I wore the juice….” he said. Police were soon to learn that Mr. Wheeler had rubbed lemon juice all over his face before committing the robberies. His assumption was that the chemistry of lemon juice was perfect to hide his face from the cameras based on an apparently limited understanding of its use as an Invisible Ink.
Their conclusion, best summarized by Dunning himself in his book Self-insight: Roadblocks and Detours on the Path to Knowing Thyself (2005), was this:
“If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent … The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.” — David Dunning
Dunning-Kruger Effect in the Workplace
I’m sure that you can easily picture this progression in the real world now. Whether you’re thinking about yourself or some other hapless new member of your team, someone in your life has ridden this wave before. It’s also a large part of what we commonly call ‘Imposter Syndrome’ wherein a person believes that they aren’t qualified to do what they’re doing and will be found out.
But is the Dunning-Kruger Effect a bad thing?
Studies so far have been inconclusive. One school of thought is that this cycle is indicative of how human beings learn. Author Malcolm Gladwell recently explored the phenomena of human perceptions. In his example, focused on lying, he states that people need “an overwhelming amount of evidence” before they are able to overcome their initial bias that what they believe to be the truth really is the truth.
In this way, the valley in the Dunning-Kruger Effect would be a defining moment for a learner where they are forced to acknowledge that they have more to learn and be an indispensable requirement to a greater capacity for learning.
However, the other argument could be easily made as well. While on the initial upswing of learning, the mistakes would have a distinct cost. Because, as Dunning puts it in his 2014 paper with Erik Helzer (“Beyond the Correlation Coefficient in Studies of Self-Assessment Accuracy: Commentary on Zell & Krizan”), “poor performers are not in a position to recognize the shortcomings in their performance”.
Therefore, these errors that are made on the road to understanding are often not caught until some damage has been done.
Is This An American Problem?
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is based in studies centered in North America, but this research has fascinated scientists world-wide. Multiple studies have been completed in other geographies since. One of these studies, “Divergent Consequences of Success and Failure in Japan and North America: An Investigation of Self-improving Motivations and Malleable Selves” (2001), compared the North American results with those of Japanese participants.
The study found that a similar effect was observable in the Japanese samples as well. However, there was one sizable difference: the Japanese studies didn’t see this assured failure as a negative.
While the Japanese did opt for underestimating their abilities more than they were likely to overestimate them. However, the saw underachievement not as an embarrassment but as an opportunity.
Japanese respondents saw failure as an opportunity to improve their abilities and, accordingly, improve their overall value within the group.
How to Handle the Dunning-Kruger Effect
This effect has been observed throughout the ages and goes by many other names. You can find the bones of this idea inside the Big Fish-Little Pond Effect, Illusory Superiority, or even called the Curse of Knowledge. But now that you know what you’re fighting, how can you overcome it for your own life or your employees? Luckily, we have codified a few great ways to mitigate this problem so far:
Job Shadowing
Job Shadowing has been a very successful training practice for decades. This concept is the basis for apprenticeships which have been at the center of the working economy for thousands of years. At its core, Job Shadowing is a great way to plunge a new employee into the deep end quickly without risk. This experience allows new teammates to get a more detailed and accurate understanding of the challenges ahead. This greater awareness of what the job requires allows for a more accurate training roadmap and better self-assessment.
Periodic Re-training
When a team member thinks that they have got it all figured out, they no longer have a reason to motivate through self-directed education. When the self-assessment degrades, these folks will need access to that training material again. Periodic re-training programs give continual access to varying content sources. Not only are these a great safety-net for a new employee getting a new perspective, but they can serve as prompts to strengthen skills for existing workers. Win-win.
Anonymized Self-Assessment
The best way to understand whether your employees need help through their confidence dip is to engage systems that can show this to you. Many Learning Management Systems include a self-assessment functionality today. The results, anonymized or not, help to paint a picture of where your staff feels they need a leg up. Anonymizing this data allows for more honesty. When you see an employee trend their confidence with these skills down, a manager can be aware that it’s time to lend a hand to get things on track for a great and engaged long-term employee.
There are nearly infinite individual strategies for working through this issue. In most cases, the learner figures this out on their own. Awareness of the effect simply helps to maintain more reasonable expectations as a learner moves through this process.
Indeed, for many people that experience this effect, their work may not suffer in the slightest. For others, they may have issues in this time. In either case, we can see that this effect is a nearly universal experience as millions of people transition within the workforce each year. So no, it wasn’t just you.
