Posted by Quartz Obsession

An expert in your field, and everyone else's, too.

It’s not just sitcom dads and bosses—the people who know the least are often convinced they know the most. And there’s research to prove it.

Social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger identified this all-too-frequent cognitive bias as “illusory superiority.”

 

To investigate this phenomenon, now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, they (left) designed some clever experiments. In one study, they asked undergraduate students a series of questions about grammar, logic, and jokes, and then asked each student to estimate their score overall, as well as their relative rank compared to the other students. Those who scored in the bottom quartile estimated that they had performed better than two-thirds of the other students.

Before you roll your eyes and protest that of course stupid people are too stupid to realise it, let this sink in: While Dunning and Kruger did find a link between obnoxious overconfidence and ignorance, the effect is universal. We all have blind spots of unearned confidence, and it can be an important (if embarrassing) part of the learning process.

 

As legions of armchair epidemiologists spring up in the midst of a global pandemic, and celebrities with millions of followers on social media, but no relevant medical training repeat dubious information, the Dunning-Kruger effect seems less like a punchline. So how do we know what we know—and what we don’t?

 

 

BY THE DIGITS

90%: Share of participants, in a study at Cornell University, who claimed to be familiar with at least one of nine made-up concepts or terms

>33%: Share of participants in a recent study who claimed to know more about the causes of autism than doctors or scientists

70%: Share of people who have imposter syndrome—the belief that they don’t deserve their success

AUS$7 million: Estimated cost of the Sydney Opera House, projected to be opened in 1963, a classic example of planning fallacy

AUS$102 million: Actual cost of the project when it opened in 1973

23%: Share of recently bankrupt respondents to the 2012 National Financial Capability Study who gave themselves the highest possible rating on financial knowledge

 

EXPLAIN IT LIKE I'M FIVE

It's about ignorance, not intelligence

The Dunning-Kruger effect is often oversimplified and misunderstood. It’s more competency and skills than inherent ability or intelligence, and it’s a common part of the learning process.

“A whole battery of studies conducted by myself and others have confirmed that people who don’t know much about a given set of cognitive, technical, or social skills tend to grossly overestimate their prowess and performance, whether it’s grammar, emotional intelligence, logical reasoning, firearm care and safety, debating, or financial knowledge,” Dunning writes in Pacific Standard. “College students who hand in exams that will earn them Ds and Fs tend to think their efforts will be worthy of far higher grades; low-performing chess players, bridge players, and medical students, and elderly people applying for a renewed driver’s license, similarly overestimate their competence by a long shot.”

Each of us, when learning something new or diving into unknown subject matter, is likely to believe, at some point in the process, that we are experts—when we’ve just begun to scratch the surface of what is knowable.

 

Scaling Mount Stupid

If you’ve seen the meme Mount Stupid, a chart that approximates the learning curve, you may have thought that it came out of research from the Dunning-Kruger effect. Some images are even labeled as though Mount Stupid was designed by Dunning and Kruger.

It was not. Dunning, though, intrigued by the ubiquity of the image, designed an experiment designed to test its theory. He found that its trajectory, an initial quick rise in knowledge to the top of Mount Stupid where you think you’ve got it all figured out, then a steep fall and gradual rise to actual mastery, was relatively accurate.

 

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