Dunning–Kruger Effect

“Are you better than average at English grammar / vocabulary?”

“How good are you at time & money management compared to others?”

“What about reading people’s emotions?”

Knowing how competent we are and how our skills stack up against other people’s is more than a mere self-esteem boost. Questions like that, a quick check on our competence, helps us to figure out when is the right moment to move on with our plans and when we should pause and seek out advice. Our motivation for a certain task relies heavily on our evaluation of ourselves.

But psychological research suggests that we aren’t very good at evaluating ourselves accurately, in fact, we tend to overestimate ourselves in most cases. Our acute detector of errors fails us most of the time when our personal interest is involved, especially when it comes to our own weaknesses, we could be the blindest and stupidest person in the world not being able to see them. It seems that there lies a blind zone in our brain where no light is shed upon ourselves, hence the inaccurate assessment.

Worse even, we display superiority over others, assuming that we are better than other people to a degree. For example, 88% drivers described themselves as having above average driving skills, which obviously violates the law of mathematics. But that’s far from alone. On average, people show a strong inclination of overrating themselves better than most in disciplines ranging from health, logical reasoning, leadership skills, financial knowledge, ethics, and beyond. In the field of psychology, this phenomenon is given the name “Dunning–Kruger Effect”, a cognitive bias in which people of low ability have illusory superiority and mistakenly assess their cognitive ability as greater than it is.

What’s particularly intriguing is that those with the least ability are often the most likely to exaggerate their skills to the greatest extent. It’s a commonplace that top students with a clean track records of all As in their academic studies appear to be less confident and provide lower but more accurate estimates of their scores after an exam (not doing it out of humbleness or disguised pride), while those below average students sound more positive and asserting when offering bolder answers that contradict their actual results.

What breeds such differences? First, our inescapable incompetence in certain fields. Our knowledge gaps ensure that fact that we can’t be a know-it-all, and even the true genius’ wits fall short sometimes. Second, the lack of expertise to recognize our shortcomings. In other words, it takes  self-retrospection and metacognition, a more advanced cognitive skill, to be fully acknowledged of our own flaws and deficits, which isn’t peachy at all. Meanwhile, the well-educated experts tend to be aware of how knowledgeable they are and assume that everyone else is as knowledgeable. Consequentially, people, whether they’re inept or highly skilled, are often caught in the bubble of inaccurate self-perception.

The only way to escape from it is never stop learning no matter how old we are, where we are and what we are doing. It reveals what’s invisible to us before so that we can take measures tailored to that situation and avoid further damage. It’s easier said than done. But the point is we have to know enough to know that we still have a lot we don’t know, about ourselves, about others, and about the world. We drop dead the moment we stop thinking and learning.