We All Think We're Experts. We're Not.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect points to why so many of us believe we’re more informed or skilled than we actually are. This can sometimes result in bad or dangerous outcomes.
What I watched: “The Dunning-Kruger Effect - Cognitive Bias - Why Incompetent People Think They Are Competent.” by Trace Dominguez for After Skool. Posted October 1, 2019.
My guess is I could scroll through some of my social media posts of recent weeks and find an instance of the Dunning-Kruger Effect at work. I think I’m a smart guy. I read voraciously. I probably think I’m more of an expert in some things than I really am.
Yes, there are certain topic areas for which I’m highly informed and in some cases have longstanding experience or skill, but even in those areas I try to embrace the forever student mindset. I often fail. Far too many times I’ve been proven wrong about something about which I was quite certain.
This is not an easy thing to admit. No one wants to admit a stance they were willing to argue in depth turned out to be wrong or somehow misguided. But it happens. Simply being mindful that the Dunning-Kruger Effect is a natural human tendency can blunt a lot of spouting off with overly confident authority.
Psychology Today describes the Dunning-Kruger Effect like this.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people wrongly overestimate their knowledge or ability in a specific area. This tends to occur because a lack of self-awareness prevents them from accurately assessing their own skills.
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I would add “knowledge” to “assessing their own skills” in that definition since it’s not just our skills for which we often have a bloated sense of expertise but also knowledge and information. But it’s a pretty good definition.
Right now, at this point in our nation’s history, I think pointing out the prevalence of the Dunning-Kruger Effect is especially important. For example, peruse any social media feed to witness conspiracy theorists being interviewed and you’ll see the Effect in full view.
Sometimes the ramifications of the Effect aren’t dire. If someone privately believes there are aliens walking on the surface of the Moon, who cares. Yes, they’re wrong. Yes, they have no facts to back up their beliefs. But much like flat earth people one can always find “evidence” that supports their misguided beliefs.
But sometimes the results can be quite dangerous. Look at how many people were willing to attempt to violently overthrow our democracy on January 6, 2021. They believed an outright lie that the election was stolen despite absolutely no proof.
Most of us have heard of confirmation bias.
Confirmation bias is the tendency to search for, interpret, favor, and recall information in a way that confirms or supports one's prior beliefs or values.
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Confirmation bias bolsters the Dunning-Kruger Effect by nudging people to do things like scour the internet for any smidgen of information or opinion that supports their already existing belief. When you listen to interviews of conspiracy theorists, especially the current flavor of right-wing conspiracy theorists, you’ll often hear the retort when confronted with facts or truth of “Do you own research.” Of course, all of those people would benefit from a class on how to actually do meaningful research. I randomly searched online for “best course on how to do research” and a bunch popped up, like this one from Coursera by University of London, “Understanding Research Methods.”
In the short 10-minutes video, Trace Dominguez does an excellent job of explaining the Dunning-Kruger Effect and the research that spawned its naming. After a bank robber named Wheeler brazenly robbed two banks in 1995 because he believed that rubbing lemon juice on himself would make him invisible to security cameras (I know, really?), two psychologists, David Dunning and Justin Kruger, undertook experiments and first published the results in 1999.
It's named for the two psychologists who upon hearing about Wheeler’s bank robberies formulated a set of experiments to determine if Wheeler’s juice beliefs were due to some kind of cognitive bias. Cognitive biases allow us to convince ourselves that something is true even if the reality is different. Cognitive biases protect us from reality. They let us process information more quickly and they help us make decisions more quickly. But that doesn't mean that they are good. Cognitive biases are essentially a subjective social reality. The Dunning-Kruger Effect is, in a nutshell, a way for everyone to feel good and above average internally because most of us are actually completely average. Dunning-Kruger can help explain why people feel that they're experts even though they know very little about something.
Dominguez uses climate change to illustrate the all-too-common example of people “doing their research,” which maybe amounts to an hour finding online sources that justify their belief to argue against the vast preponderance of climate scientists who have concluded climate change is both quite real and directly tied to the human activity, especially the burning of fossil fuels.
Examples of the Effect abound. Further research demonstrates that people think much more highly of their own expertise whether that’s in the corporate sector or how well they believe they drive a car.
I’ll leave it to the video to explain how some of these studies were conducted but suffice it to say the Effect is widespread and pervasive. But one aspect of the Effect is especially problematic in my view.
In one study, those who ended up doing the worst in assessing their own knowledge and skill placed themselves in the 58th percentile on average.
They believed they were better than 57 other people out of 100. Their real score? The 12th percentile. They were worse than 88 other people.
It didn’t matter what areas researchers have studied, the Effect was present throughout. Assessing effective leadership, raising children, and constructing a solid logical argument were among the areas of life in which the Effect showed itself to be prevalent.
Generally, in each study the participants in the bottom 25% of scores consistently ranked themselves in the 70th percentile.
The Effect has been demonstrated in yet more areas of life such as math skills, wine tasting, chess, firearm safety among hunters, and medical knowledge among surgeons. There is no area of life that seems to escape the Effect’s influence.
While those at the bottom rankings of knowledge and skill tend to rate themselves far more generously, those at the top of an area of knowledge and skill tend to do the opposite. The very best in their fields tend to rank themselves below their actual performance. That’s why I’ll generally take the word of someone who’s done extensive research and work in an area over some random person on the internet screaming into the void that they’ve discovered some bonkers new bit of data that disproves an entire body of research. Maybe that’s why true experts tend to be more humble than those on the fringes.
People in the bottom 25% ranked themselves at near the top and people in the top 25% tend to rank themselves a bit lower than their actual score.
Then Dominguez gets to the crux of why it’s so difficult to counter the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
In order to know you don’t know anything you gotta have to know something.
As an example, in modern political parlance, there is a group of people sometimes referred to as “low information voters.” Sadly, these are also the people who will dig in their heels on political social issues or candidates when they actually know little about the issue or person. We see how easy some people have been manipulated politically in recent years and I contend that’s in large part due to the low information voter who in turn are usually living examples of the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Low performers, let’s say in work environments, are often the most resistant to criticism and correction. I’m sure we’ve all seen this happen. I sure have. They also don’t show interest in self-improvement, something else I’m sure we’ve all witnessed.
It should be obvious how dangerous and problematic the pervasiveness of the Dunning-Kruger Effect is in our culture. The best thing we can do is recognize this ourselves so we have a more realistic view of our knowledge, experience, and skills while also being aware that those who rank lower in those things are more likely to tout their expertise even if unfounded.
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