Learning How Little You Know: How the Dunning-Kruger Effect Might be Holding You Back

Following the U.S. election, there was a spate of articles mentioning the Dunning-Kruger Effect. While often brought up during an election cycle, Dunning-Kruger has day to day implications in the development of our skills and talents. It’s also a good thing to be aware of from a managerial standpoint.

“The fool doth think he is wise, but the wise man knows himself to be a fool.”—William Shakespeare, As You Like It

So, what is the Dunning-Kruger Effect (beyond a shorthand for calling your political opponents fools)? Named after psychologist David Dunning and his (at the time) grad student Justin Kruger the Dunning-Kruger Effect is the observation that “people who are ignorant or unskilled in a given domain tend to believe they are much more competent than they are”.

Journalist Mark Murphy, gives an excellent summary in the January 24th issue of Forbes. Providing a chart well-known in psychological circles.

What you might notice here is that a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing. Those with zero knowledge have a healthy sense of confidence as to their skill level (very bottom left). However, people with even a bit of experience think they know it all (note where that confidence level peaks in the upper left).

Then, as people get more experience, they realize how little they know (or for a more positive way of looking at this, how much more they have to learn). There you see that big dip of humility.

As people reach “expert” level the confidence level climes back up (though notice it never reaches the peak of that upper left).

Statistics of how people self-evaluate provide real-world evidence of Dunning-Kruger. Results often show the majority of people as rating themselves “above average” (a mathematical impossibility).

Nobody wants to feel ignorant or foolish. And the overconfidence of Dunning-Kruger is understandable to a point (it keeps you getting up out of bed in the morning without first having to haul off the full weight of everything you DON’T KNOW). This type of mental self-preservation is a neighbour to tendencies like optimism bias, where your brain is offering a skewed perspective to protect your psyche.

It has to do with our perception of how much time something should take as well. It takes little time to move from novice to amateur. It takes more time to move from amateur to expert. It takes more time still to move from expert to master.

Our sense of “how much time this should take” is off due to the quick intake of knowledge in those early learning days.

Knowing about Dunning-Kruger might prevent you from falling into the trap of Dunning-Kruger. Always seek to be one level outside of your comfort zone (this is how growth happens, it is most often uncomfortable). And if you are in management and an employee’s self-evaluation seems far greater than their actual performance know that this is common.

Perspective as to where one actually is in terms of development is the only way to reach the level of mastery where confidence aligns with skill.

And the most important lesson is that there is always more to learn.

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