The more a person knows, the more obvious it is to him how scarce this knowledge is (recall the attributed to Socrates “I know that I know nothing”). This law works with the same success and vice versa: the less a person knows, the more confident he is in his knowledge and its infinity. Today we have translated an article on the cognitive distortion of inflated self-esteem and the illusion of competence - the so-called Dunning-Kruger effect. Together with Knowing Neurons Editor-in-Chief Keith Feilhaber, we understand why some people cannot adequately assess their skills, cognitive abilities and level of popularity, what consequences this can lead to, and what distinguishes truly competent people.
One day in 1995, a large, healthy middle-aged man robbed two Pittsburgh banks in broad daylight. He was not wearing a mask or any other disguise, and he smiled while looking at the security cameras before leaving each bank. Later that night, police apprehended a shocked criminal MacArthur Wheeler. When they showed him the footage, Wheeler stared in disbelief.
Wheeler apparently believed that applying lemon juice to his skin rendered him invisible to video cameras. After all, lemon juice is used as invisible ink, so, according to Wheeler's logic, as long as he is not near a heat source, he should be completely invisible.
The police concluded that Wheeler was not crazy or drugged - he was just deeply mistaken.
This story was stumbled upon by David Dunning of Cornell University, who enlisted the help of his graduate student, Justin Kruger, to figure out what happened then.
They reasoned that while almost everyone views their abilities positively in various social and intellectual spheres, some people tend to overstate them by mistake.
This illusion of confidence is today known as the "Dunning-Kruger effect" and describes a cognitive distortion of inflated self-esteem.
To investigate this phenomenon in the laboratory, Dunning and Kruger developed several experiments. In one study, they asked students a series of questions about grammar, logic, and humor, and then asked each respondent to rate their overall performance as well as their relative ranking compared to other students. It is noteworthy that the students who scored the lowest on cognitive tasks always overestimated how well they did. Conversely, those students who underestimated their grades performed better than two-thirds of the others.
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This "illusion of confidence" extends beyond the university and permeates real life.
In the next study, Dunning and Kruger left the walls of the laboratory and went to the shooting range, where they interviewed gunmen about the safety of the weapon. Similar to their previous results, those who answered the fewest questions correctly overestimated their knowledge of firearms madly.
Outside of factual knowledge, the Dunning-Kruger effect can also be observed when people evaluate many other personal abilities.
If you watch any talent show, you may notice the shock on the faces of the contestants who did not pass the casting and were rejected by the judges.
It can seem funny when people really don't know how deluded they are by their own perceived superiority.
Of course, it is common for us to overestimate our abilities. One study found that 80% of drivers rate their driving skills above average, which is a statistical impossibility. And similar trends are seen when people assess their popularity and cognitive ability.
The problem is that when people are incompetent, they not only come to the wrong conclusions, but they also lack the ability to recognize their mistakes.
One study of students that lasted for a semester showed that successful students were good at predicting their performance on exams based on past grades. However, the most lagging students did not acknowledge their problems, despite clear and repeated negative assessments from teachers. Instead of being confused, perplexed, or pondering their wrong approaches, ignorant students insisted that they were right.
As Charles Darwin wrote in The Descent of Man (1871):
In their classic study, Dunning and Kruger observed that really smart people are not able to accurately assess their abilities. Those students whose cognitive scores were in the upper quartile ⓘThe upper quartile is the part of the dataset with the highest scores in statistical studies, underestimating their relative competence. Such students believed that if tasks were easy for them, then they must be easy for everyone else.
This is the so-called "impostor syndrome" and it can be compared with another aspect of the Dunning-Kruger effect, which occurs when students with high scores cannot recognize their talents and believe that others are equally competent.
The difference is that truly competent people, as opposed to incompetent people, are open to criticism and are able to adjust their self-esteem based on the appropriate feedback.
And therein lies the key to the unreasonable behavior of that bank robber. Sometimes we try to do things that lead to beneficial results, but sometimes - like the lemon juice idea - our approaches are imperfect, irrational, ridiculous, or just plain stupid.
The trick is not to be fooled by the illusion of superiority and to systematically review your competence.
In the end, as Confucius said,