Are you as smart as you think you are?

Source: The Creativity Post

Are you sure that you are smart? Can you be accurate when estimating your competency in a particular skill or field? Maybe NOT. This uncertainty is due to a cognitive bias, namely, the Dunning-Kruger effect.

What is the Dunning-Kruger effect?

It is a cognitive bias according to which less-skilled individuals tend to overestimate their skill level. In contrast, the highly skilled ones tend to underestimate their competency. 

In other words, a person who has little knowledge about a field tends to think that he might be close to an expert in the field or might consider himself to be above-average in the least. While in reality, he might be among the bottom 10 to 20 percentile of the folks in the field. On the other hand, a person with a post-graduate degree in that field might feel that he would probably lie in the 70 percentile range. Although, he might be better than 90% of people out there. This underestimate is not because he doubts his skill but because he feels that other people in the field are as knowledgeable as him.

We see examples of this bias all around us. From news debates to useless twitter battles, it exists everywhere. The worldwide access to information through the internet has only strengthened this bias in people. Again, all thanks to community groups and confirmation bias (according to which a person tends to seek information that leans towards the side he/she agrees with, usually ignoring the other side).

How was it discovered?

Source: kiwireport

A fascinating robbery case of 1995 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has been famed to start this entire field of study. This case is about a McArthur Wheeler who robbed two banks without a mask in broad daylight. He even looked straight into the security cameras, maybe trying to give a pose. And if it wasn't obvious, he was soon arrested, after which he exclaimed the famous phrase, "I wore the Juice!". 

Upon further interrogation, the cops found that Wheeler believed that wearing lemon juice on his face would make him invisible (which he extrapolated from the fact that lemon juice disappears ink on paper).

The case was soon famous, and Wheeler was named one of the dumbest criminals of all time. Soon this case reached the ears of the Cornell psychology professor David Dunning, who, along with a graduate student Justin Kruger, went on to conduct a series of experiments to test his premise for the cognitive bias involved.

In their experiments, they tested various psychology undergraduate students on grammar, logic, and humor. They further asked them to estimate their scores and how well they did relative to others. The results found that the students who scored low had widely overestimated their relative performance. The difference in the actual and perceived performance was so huge that it shocked Dunning as well since people with the lowest scores thought they were better than two-thirds of the people there.

These findings were further replicated in numerous experiments conducted by various universities in many fields like politics, weaponry, sports, etc. These studies led to confirming the legitimacy of their hypothesis and publishing the paper named "Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments" in 1999. The bias is so widespread that even the authors emphasized in their paper that one may look in the mirror for the nearest example for the Dunning-Kruger effect.

The Dunning-Kruger graph

Source: expertprogrammanagement

The graph above shows how confidence and competence vary as one sets out to learn a particular skill or subject.

1. When one starts off learning about a subject and gains little information, a surge of confidence kicks in, and the person feels he knows pretty much everything about the subject. This is where the overestimation of one's skills occurs where one thinks he/she is definitely above average while in reality, their skills might be below average.

2. When one crosses that initial confidence high and learns further about the subject or skill, he/she realizes that there is a ton of stuff they have no clue about. During this phase, even though they might have an average understanding of the field, they might feel they know nothing about it and that their efforts in learning were all in vain. This is where most of us give up, feeling that we are not getting anywhere with this and shouldn't waste more of our time in that field, while in reality, that isn't true.

3. Further crossing that subsequent confidence low and gaining expertise in the field helps people gain their confidence and competence in the field. This is where you know enough stuff about the field to assess yourself accurately. But since one's peer group would also be equally competent in the field, one tends to think other people also know either as much or maybe more than them, due to which they tend to underestimate their skill relative to the population.

Can we overcome this bias?

All of us have faced this bias at some point in our lives because no one can be an expert in all the fields. Hence this bias kicks in where your knowledge of the field is very basic or rudimentary. 

But that doesn't mean that we cannot overcome it. On the contrary, consciously knowing about this bias serves as a good start since now you can be aware of your knowledge and where you would stand in the world in a particular field.

This newly acquired knowledge (even if you already knew) can be coupled with the below techniques to help tackle the Dunning-Kruger effect.

1. Keep Calm and Don't stop: One of the obvious ways to not fall prey to this bias is to keep on learning. As shown in the graph above, you would pass through confidence highs and lows in your learning journey. But don't let that high or low make you give up on learning, and eventually, you will gain both expertise and confidence in the field.

2. Constructive criticism: Another thing to keep you on your tracks is criticism from other people. This can help identify and rectify the mistakes (some of which you might not even be aware of). But you need to make sure that you analyze the criticisms from experts of that field or your peers whom you trust, not from people who like to criticize people who are doing better than them and progressing in life. Feedback from such people is useless and should be ignored instead.

3. Question your knowledge: Even after having the willpower and proper feedback, you might tend to seek and test your knowledge on topics you already know (confirmation bias). This may hamper your progress (in some cases sending you completely off-track). This is why it is important to keep questioning your knowledge and exploring new topics (something that your mind wouldn't be comfortable doing but is helpful and necessary in the long run).

Conclusion

Not all fields are susceptible to this bias. For example, learning skills like baking or playing violin usually do not have the Dunning-Kruger effect because there is not much gray area in between. You either know to bake a good cake, or you don't; you either know to play that complicated song, or you don't. This lack of a gray area and instant feedback right then and there help you not fall into the pothole of this effect.

But many academic and everyday corporate and social skills are heavily affected by this bias. Hence, it becomes essential for us to be aware of it and try to overcome it. This will not only help us avoid falling into this bias but also help us notice it in other people, thereby helping us make much more accurate judgments and decisions.

Written and edited by: Yash Jayesh Doshi