The Ignorance of Our Ignorance — The Dunning-Kruger Effect
Are you as good at something as you think you are? Or is it time for you to sit down a bit and examine how competent you are in different areas of your life? This rather unknown, but remarkably ubiquitous, cognitive bias might have the answer.
On January 6th, 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into a bank in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, his face glazing with lemon juice. He did not wear a mask, or hood or made any effort to conceal his identity. Holding a semi-automatic handgun to the teller, Wheeler walked out with $5,200. On his way out, he looked directly at the surveillance cameras and smiled. He went into another bank that day and robbed it in broad daylight, repeating the same pattern.
When the banks reported the robberies, the police came and obtained the security footage, which they broadcasted on the local 11 o’clock news. The police promptly received a tip-off, and a few hours into the midnight, they were knocking at Wheeler’s door. When they showed him the footage the security cameras took of him robbing the banks, McArthur Wheeler seemed dumbfounded, and he mumbled under his breath: “But I wore the juice.” At this point, if you are confused, don’t worry, everyone was: McArthur Wheeler was, the police were, the media was, everyone.
Wheeler believed that squeezing lemon juice on his face would make him invisible to the security cameras. He thought so because lemon juice works as invisible ink on paper. When freshly squeezed, it has a slightly yellow tint. When diluted with water, it becomes crystal clear, and you can use it to write on a sheet of paper. When it dries up, it becomes pretty much invisible, and when you heat it, the lemon juice oxidizes into a brown substance, revealing whatever you had written.
Baffled by this reasoning, two psychologists at Cornell University studied McArthur Wheeler and others like him. They concluded that people with low ability at a task tend to, paradoxically, overestimate their competence. It also works the other way around — people who are highly competent at something tend to think they are average. This eponymous cognitive bias is called the Dunning-Kruger effect, and we all suffer from it — you, I, everyone.
What Is Dunning-Kruger Effect?
English philosopher Bertrand Russell once said: “One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”
What’s truly fascinating is that Russell said that long before the advent of the internet — when social media was non-existent and post-truth was a word you would get ridiculed for uttering out loud.
Today, in contrast, we are living in the age of the internet. We are regularly exposed to legions of people on social media who have no idea what the fuck they are talking about. And, as Russell pointed out, the more ignorant these people are, the more confident they are in their beliefs.
Russell’s axiom has been studied extensively, and it turns out that it’s true. People who are bad at something do believe that they are really good at it, while people who are really good at something do believe they are bad at it. Newbies in any field think they have it all figured out, while seasoned veterans believe no one knows anything for sure.
What Russell captured in one sentence is now known as the “Dunning-Kruger effect”, named after David Dunning and Justin Kruger, who discovered it in a series of experiments in 1999. It is the cognitive bias where people who are really bad at something think they are really good at it, while those who are really skilled believe they are fairly good.
In the study reported in their paper “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”, Dunning and Kruger tested the abilities of four groups of young adults in three categories — grammar, humour, and logic (reasoning).
In the grammar study, 84 undergraduates completed a 20-item test and then rated their ability and performance. Those who scored the lowest on the test (10th percentile) drastically overestimated their proficiency in English grammar (67th percentile) and their test score (61 percentile). In contrast, those who scored the highest drastically underestimated their ability and test scores, which almost perfectly lined up.
This study corroborated their predictions that compared to their more competent peers, incompetent individuals overestimated their performance and failed to gain insight into their actual level of performance. Dunning and Kruger summarized this: “…people who lack the knowledge or wisdom to perform well are often unaware of this fact. We attribute this lack of awareness to a deficit in metacognitive skill [awareness of one’s own thoughts]. That is, the same incompetence that leads them to make wrong choices also deprives them of the savvy necessary to recognize competence, be it their own or anyone else’s.”
It is important to note that Dunning and Kruger emphasized that the effect they had identified in their study did not imply that people always overestimate or underestimate their competence. Whether they do so depend on the domain in which they evaluate themselves (most footballers don’t think they are better than Messi; most chess players don’t think their skills rival those of Gary Kasparov).
In the graph above, you can see there is indeed a positive correlation between actual performance (grey line) and perceived performance (black line): people in the top quartile think they are better than the people in the second quartile, which in turn think they are better than people in the third quartile and so on. So, the bias here is that unskilled people don’t think they are better than skilled people, but that they are much better than they actually are.
It’s Everywhere!
In a study in 2008, researchers asked students to assess their performance immediately after taking various tests. Unsurprisingly, the results replicated those of Dunning and Kruger. They showed that:
· Students in the lower quadrant in terms of performance expected to see a test score of 60, but they actually scored less than 40
· Students in the middle quadrant expected a score of 72% but got 61 %.
· Students in the upper quadrant expected a score of 75 percent, but they got 84 %
The greatest overestimation was in the lowest 25%, while the greatest underestimation was in the highest 25%.
The Dunning-Kruger effect is evident in non-academic areas as well. For example:
· Gun owners who think they are more knowledgeable about guns don’t know shit about them.
· Medical lab workers — people who process samples for test results — rate themselves as highly competent at their job, but score the lowest in evaluation tests.
· Anti-vaxxers think they know as much as, or more than, doctors about what causes autism.
· Elderly who believe they are better drivers than most are actually four times more likely to make dangerous driving mistakes.
· Lowest-performing college students dramatically overestimate their performance on exams and their general area of study.
· People with the unhealthiest lifestyles rate themselves as healthier than they actually are.
· People who score the lowest on cognitive and analytical tests overestimate their ability and performance, while people who score the highest underestimate their competence, as shown by the 2008 study mentioned earlier.
The Paradox of Our Ignorance
Human knowledge i.e., everything that an individual knows, can be divided into four quadrants:
Known knowns:
It is the information you know you understand, like how to make a sandwich or ride a bicycle.
Known unknowns:
It is the information you know you don’t know. For example, I know that I don’t know shit about aerospace engineering.
Unknown knowns:
It is information you know, but you don’t realize you know it. For example, you might know the shortcut to the nearby supermarket from the hotel room you rented in the city you visited years ago.
Unknown unknowns:
It is the information that we are completely oblivious to. Not only do we don’t know it, but we also don’t realize that we don’t know it.
It is the unknown unknowns where the Dunning-Kruger effect appears in the worst possible way. We tend to underestimate our talent/skills/knowledge and overestimate our own ignorance.
When we are amateurs at something, we are very aware of the things that we know we know, and we are completely oblivious to things we don’t know. Let’s see basketball for an example:
If you don’t know anything about basketball, it seems simple enough to play — you simply throw the ball in the hoop. But as you play more, you start to learn that there are certain nuances to the game — how you throw the ball, the mechanics of your elbow, wrist, and forearm, and how you hold the ball in your hand. You discover different shots, like the finger roll, the lay-up, the alley-oop, and the fadeaway jumper. You are beginning to understand the things you don’t know, and there is a lot you don’t know.
Let’s say you’ve spent a year working on basketball. You’ve mastered the different shots and learned the shoot with good form. Now you are getting into the weeds of different defensive strategies. At this point, you are no longer thinking about your shooting or how you throw a free throw. You’ve forgotten that you know this stuff because it has become instinctive. It’s unconscious. It’s automatic. It’s the stuff you know pretty well, but you’ve forgotten you knew it.
Another way to visualize this is to think of knowledge as a circle — the area inside is your knowledge of a particular topic, while the circumference is its horizon. This border is what determines your uncertainty or doubt. Interestingly, as the size of your circle grows, so does the horizon or your knowledge. So, the more you know, the more you realize what you don’t know.
But something else is also happening. As you gain and implement knowledge, you forget that you know it. So, there is a second smaller circle inside the large circle — it’s the stuff you know that you know, but you’ve forgotten that you knew it. So, for an expert, not only the horizon of their knowledge is more extended, but most of their knowledge is unconscious — they’ve forgotten that they know it. All this information strikes them as so obvious that why think about it?
The difference between an amateur and a professional is that an amateur’s knowledge is known to them. It still hasn’t had enough time to sink in and be automatic, so they feel smart about it. But an expert, so much of their knowledge is either unconscious or automatic that they get to think that they don’t know shit.
So, an idiot thinks he knows everything because he doesn’t have enough knowledge to know better. For him, inexperience casts the illusion of expertise. But an expert thinks she knows nothing because she knows all the different ways she might be wrong.
The Dunning-Kruger effect goes beyond ignorance. It presents us with a meta-layer of our ignorance — the ignorance of our own ignorance. It is one thing to make a mistake and realize you could’ve done better. But it is quite another thing to make a mistake and not even realize it, and then continue to believe you never made any mistake.
But I Really Am Awesome, Aren’t I?
Now as you read all that, you probably did what most people do when confronted with this realization.
“Pssh, those other people are so dumb. Good thing I know all the things that I’m terrible at — I’m the worst painter, my steaks are often overcooked and don’t get me started on my golf swing, it’s horrific. So, this means I know pretty well what I’m really good at. Right?”
Well, no. This is the problem with learning about cognitive biases — just because we know about them, we assume we are somehow immune to them. But research has repeatedly shown that teaching people about cognitive biases does not make them less susceptible to them. It is a phenomenon that visits us all sooner or later, but some are a little less flamboyant about it than others. Part of the human condition is recognizing our own ignorance — we see it in others, but we don’t see it in ourselves. As David Dunning said in an interview: “The first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of the Dunning-Kruger club. People miss that.”
We read things like this and fail to consider that we are delusional in the areas we think we are really good at. We fall prey to this blindspot.
Perhaps nowhere are our blindspots more evident when it comes to emotional intelligence. We project our bullshit onto other people, misplace our anger and judgment, shut down when we get uncomfortable, overcompensate for feelings of inferiority, let our jealousy get the best of us, and be insensitive pricks without realizing it.
But then some of us think we don’t do it as much as others (again, the Dunning-Kruger effect is at play). But the scientific data refutes it — people who rank themselves arrogantly high on emotional intelligence tests score the lowest. And it gets worse. The same people are more reluctant to feedback about their scores and much less interested in the resources that would help them improve their emotional intelligence. Just think about it for a second — when a person consistently overestimates their ability, they are also more likely to reject feedback, mistakenly thinking that others are stupid and don’t understand them. Those who feel they know enough about something will disregard feedback because they don’t see it as necessary. This way, they fail to learn from their mistakes and make progress. You can see where I am going with this, right?
And as we have seen, this is not just limited to emotions — the Dunning-Kruger effect is everywhere.
So here we are, trapped in a universe where the people who need help the most not only refuse it, they refuse to even believe they need help in the first place. Aren’t we just totally fucked — is there a way out?
The Paradox of Overcoming Our Ignorance
The Dunning-Kruger effect is wrapped in contradiction, which explains why it is so frustratingly difficult to overcome. How do you get someone to look at something they can’t even see? How do you solve a problem that doesn’t exist? How do you rectify a mistake that you never made?
This is the paradox of overcoming our ignorance: the very thing that would help us see our mistakes would also help us not make them in the first place. The people who need help combating the Dunning-Kruger effect— and that’s a lot of people — not only refuse it, they refuse to believe they need it. As professor Dunning notes: “The knowledge and intelligence that are required to be good at a task are often the same qualities needed to recognize that one is not good at that task — and if one lacks such knowledge and intelligence, one remains ignorant that one is not good at that task.”
For example, if you are not really good at learning new languages, it might be hard for you to tell that you are not very good because the skills that you need to distinguish someone who is very good from someone who is not are the ones you lack. If you can’t hear the difference between two phoneme, who can you tell who has a more native-like pronunciation and who doesn’t? If you don’t understand the words in another language, how can you compare the size of your own vocabulary with others?
The Dunning-Kruger effect also explains why you can’t reason with a conspiracy theorist. They can’t change their beliefs and opinions with reason because they are not based on reason. If they could change their beliefs with reason, they would not have believed all that bullshit in the first place. If you have ever conversed with a conspiracy theorist, you would know that they think they are the only reasoned people to begin with — the rest of us are just blindly following the propaganda so meticulously fed to us by the global Jewish elite.
The problem here is that we are afraid of uncertainty — we don’t like the feeling of not knowing. And so, setting up a belief that helps us make sense of the world, no matter how illogical or unlikely it is, makes us feel safe. Whether that belief is true or not doesn’t matter — it rids us of the anxiety of not knowing.
How to Overcome It?
At this point, I will just go ahead and say it: you can’t overcome the Dunning-Kruger effect. Before you go all berserker and start cursing me for what a dick you think I am, let me give you some good news — you can’t overcome the Dunning-Kruger effect completely, but you can mitigate it. Research suggests there might be a backdoor way to infiltrate our minds and unfuck them.
Before you go out telling people how stupid you think they are, let’s just clear this one thing — the Dunning-Kruger effect does not reflect low intelligence, but rather a lack of insight and reflection on our own abilities. People suffering from this effect are not stupid to think that they are smart — they are unaware of all the different ways they might be wrong.
As much as you would like to be a dick to some of these people, it just won’t help them realize how ignorant they are. Ridiculing people and mocking their beliefs is no way of persuading them to relinquish their beliefs — it only causes them to become more defensive and double down on their challenged beliefs.
But there are a few ways that actually work.
1. Getting people to focus on developing skills, rather than assessing their own abilities (as in various tests), has an effect. If someone is terrible at accounting and doesn’t realize it, you can teach them organization skills, and in the process of learning, they come to understand that they didn’t know shit about organizing paperwork and recording transactions.
2. You can also gently peer pressure someone into seeing their own ignorance by showing them examples of top performers in whatever field they think they are really good at, like football or photography.
3. Being intellectually humbler is another option. Intellectual humility is the ability to accept that our ideas and attitudes might be wrong and be able to question and revise them. By intentionally underestimating our abilities and competence, we open ourselves to more opportunities for learning and growing. We also foster a more realistic worldview and prevent ourselves from looking like narcissistic fucktwits around others. Research also supports this — a 2021 study found that people who score highest on intellectual humility were less likely to overestimate their performance in tests.
4. Reflecting on our own experience and seeking feedback from others can help anyone, regardless of their age, gender, or educational level, form a more accurate and reliable picture of what they do and don’t know. Most people are threatened by feedback, but it helps us learn and progress. Living in partisan echo chambers of their own thoughts does not help anyone.
5. It is also helpful to teach people about the idea of the Dunning-Kruger effect and the concept of blindspots, and let those ideas slowly percolate their minds until they start questioning themselves.
But in the end, these are all palliative solutions — I believe the only surefire way to ward off our ignorance is by choosing to have fewer opinions and more loosely held beliefs. And try to be more intellectually humble — there is no shame in being wrong, or not knowing everything in the world.
That is… until we decide we are the most humble person in the world. Nobody is more humble than me. Gosh, I’m so much more humble than everybody else… and now we are back to square one.
Key Takeaways:
If you’ve made it this far, thank you — you are an angel. Here are a few things that I want you to walk away with:
- Unskilled people think they are more skilled at something than they actually are, while skilled people believe they are fairly average. This cognitive bias is called the Dunning-Kruger effect, and we all suffer from it, regardless of age, gender, or level of educational attainment.
- Poor performers suffer from a dual curse — first, they make mistakes and reach poor decisions, and second, the same knowledge gap that causes them to make mistakes also prevents them from catching their errors. They lack the knowledge needed to understand how poorly they are doing. Inexperience casts an illusion of expertise on them.
- Amateurs in any field think they have it all figured out because they are unaware of the countless ways that they might be wrong. Experts think their skills are fairly average because a large chunk of their knowledge is unconscious and automatic.
- The Dunning-Kruger effect does not necessarily reflect low intelligence, but rather a lack of insight and reflection on our own thoughts and abilities.
- The problem with overcoming the Dunning-Kruger effect is that it is wrapped in contradiction — the skills and knowledge needed to be good at something are often the same qualities needed to recognize that we are not good at it. When these qualities are missing, we remain ignorant that we are not good at a task.
- The dunning-Kruger effect is impossible to eliminate, but there are a few ways it can be mitigated, such as holding fewer opinions, having loosely held beliefs, seeking feedback, and practicing intellectual humility.
