It’s true. Science has proven what many of us always suspected: Incompetent people don’t know they’re incompetent.
Welcome to one of my favorite news stories ever, clipped from my local newspaper in 2000. It talks about the Dunning-Kruger Effect, a cognitive bias in which unskilled people not only fail to recognize their incompetence; they are supremely confident in their abilities.
For example: those poor tone-deaf souls who embarrass themselves on national TV during the first few weeks of American Idol, or your crazy uncle Larry who can’t tell a joke well to save his life. They are terrible, yes. But they think they’re really great.
From the article:
“One reason that the ignorant also tend to be blissfully self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence. The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly . . . ‘Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.’”
Sound like anyone you know? (Be careful. Incompetent people get really pissed when you point it out to them. Trust me, I know from experience.)
Here’s a link to the original paper published in 1999 by then-Cornell psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, titled “Unskilled and unaware of it: how difficulties in recognizing one’s own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments.”
Below: A TED Talk by David Dunning on “Why Incompetent People Think They’re Amazing.”
In the years since this paper was published, subsequent studies have reached similar conclusions.
In fact, an April 2018 article at VeryWellMind even suggests that we all suffer from this phenomenon — perhaps regularly.
(Thank God I am a chronic self-doubter with impostor syndrome.)
Luckily for us, the VeryWellMind author offers several tips to help us maintain a more realistic assessment of our abilities:
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- Keep learning. The more we grow our knowledge in a subject, the more likely we are to realize that we still have a lot to learn.
- Ask others what they think. When we ask people for their opinions on our performances, we receive valuable feedback that helps us to better understand how we’re really doing.
- Challenge our beliefs. From time to time, we all fall prey to confirmation bias — that is, we assign greater significance to information that supports our beliefs even as we suppress information that contradicts them. To mitigate this, we should actively seek out contrary ideas from a variety of sources, and honestly challenge ourselves to consider their merits.
Stay sharp, my friends!
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