The Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Dunning-Kruger effect: the less we know, the smarter we think we are. We all have encountered people who have an attitude of a know-it-all. And go on and on a topic at length with proclaiming others’ opinions as useless and wrong.

The Dunning-Kruger effect teaches us that people with fewer skills, abilities and knowledge tend to overestimate the skills and knowledge they have, and vice versa. How can this strange phenomenon be explained?

𝗗𝘂𝗻𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴-𝗞𝗿𝘂𝗴𝗲𝗿 𝗘𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁: A #cognitivebias in which people tend to overestimate their abilities due to poor self-awareness and low cognitive ability

In 1955, McArthur Wheeler robbed two banks without any disguise or mask. Upon his arrest, he surprisingly said: “But I wore the Lemon Juice.”

In another famous experiment, people who scored in the lowest percentiles on tests of grammar, humour & logic (12th percentile) also tended dramatically to overestimate how well they had performed (62nd percentile)

As Charles Darwin said, “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

𝗖𝗮𝘂𝘀𝗲𝘀:

👉🏻 Overestimate own skill levels and an inability to recognize a lack of own skill and mistakes.

👉🏻 A lack of metacognition: The ability to step back and look at one’s own behaviour and abilities from outside of oneself.

👉🏻 Little #knowledge leads to overconfidence.

𝗛𝗼𝘄 𝘁𝗼 𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗿𝗰𝗼𝗺𝗲 𝗗𝘂𝗻𝗻𝗶𝗻𝗴-𝗞𝗿𝘂𝗴𝗲𝗿 𝗘𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗰𝘁❓

👉🏻 Focus on #learning and practising to dig deeper about the topic.

👉🏻 Ask for constructive criticism.

👉🏻 Challenge your beliefs by questioning what you know.

If there is anything we can learn from the Dunning-Kruger effect, it is that we should not pay much attention when someone tells us that they are “very good” at something, or that they “know a lot” about this or that. It will depend on how that person views his or her own capabilities whether he or she is wrong in one way or another: either because he or she overestimates himself or herself, or because he or she underestimates his or her capabilities.

No one is an expert in all disciplines of knowledge and areas of life; we all have shortcomings and ignore many things. Each person has particular potential for improvement at any point in their life stage: the mistake is to forget this point.

From this reflection, another equally or more important one emerges. Sometimes the responsibility for the failures we experience throughout life is not due to other people or bad luck, but oneself and one’s decisions. We should therefore carry out a self-evaluation exercise when we encounter one of these obstacles in a project or work in which we are immersed.

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