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Why you're not as great as you think you are
It's not merely optimism, but rather that a total lack of expertise that renders the ignorant unable to recognize their deficiencies.
Mon, Feb 27 2012 at 12:58 PM
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Photo: CREATISTA/Shutterstock
A growing body of psychology research shows that incompetence deprives people of the ability to recognize their own incompetence. To put it bluntly, dumb people are too dumb to know it. Similarly, unfunny people don't have a good enough sense of humor to tell.
This disconnect may be responsible for many of society's problems.
With more than a decade's worth of research, David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, has demonstrated that humans find it "intrinsically difficult to get a sense of what we don't know." Whether an individual lacks competence in logical reasoning, emotional intelligence, humor or even chess abilities, the person still tends to rate his or her skills in that area as being above average.
Dunning and his colleague, Justin Kruger, formerly of Cornell and now at New York University, "have done a number of studies where we will give people a test of some area of knowledge like logical reasoning, knowledge about STDs and how to avoid them, emotional intelligence, etcetera. Then we determine their scores, and basically just ask them how well they think they've done," Dunning said. "We ask, 'what percentile will your performance fall in?'"
The results are uniform across all the knowledge domains: People who actually did well on the test tend to feel more confident about their performance than people who didn't do well, but only slightly. Almost everyone thinks they did better than average. "For people at the bottom who are really doing badly — those in the bottom 10th or 15th percentile — they think their work falls in the 60th or 55th percentile, so, above average," Dunning told Life's Little Mysteries. The same pattern emerges in tests of people's ability to rate the funniness of jokes, the correctness of grammar, or even their own performance in a game of chess. "People at the bottom still think they're outperforming other people." [Graph]
Graph: David Dunning/American Psychological Association
It's not merely optimism, but rather that their total lack of expertise renders them unable to recognize their deficiency. Even when Dunning and his colleagues offer study participants a $100 reward if they can rate themselves accurately, they cannot. "They're really trying to be honest and impartial," he said.
If only we knew ourselves better. Dunning believes people's inability to assess their own knowledge is the cause of many of society's ills, including climate change denialism. "Many people don't have training in science, and so they may very well misunderstand the science. But because they don't have the knowledge to evaluate it, they don't realize how off their evaluations might be," he said.
Moreover, even if a person has come to a very logical conclusion about whether climate change is real or not based on their evaluation of the science, "they're really not in a position to evaluate the science."
Along the same lines, people who aren't talented in a given area tend not to be able to recognize the talents or good ideas of others, from co-workers to politicians. This may impede the democratic process, which relies on citizens having the capacity to identify and support the best candidate or policy.
The ultimate takeaway of the research is the reminder that you really may not be as great as you think you are. And you might not be right about the things you believe you're right about. And if you try to joke about all this, you might not come off as funny as you think.
Follow Natalie Wolchover on Twitter @nattyover. Follow Life's Little Mysteries on Twitter @llmysteries, then join us on Facebook.
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Copyright 2012 Lifes Little Mysteries, a TechMediaNetwork company. All rights reserved.
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I think I am reasonably intelligent, uproarously funny, and totally not self-aware! Where can I take the test?
Its true for me !
ok, third try. The bit about climate change can go the other way. Perhaps those who accept global warming are the ones who overestimate their competence in understanding the issue.
Oh, right, the scientists trained in the field are all wrong, and the average idiot who thinks they know everything are actually correct. Can you even see the idiocy of that argument?
How do I show this to my supervisor, she is completely clueless about IT management and does too much micro managing on things unrelated to IT.
The picture above the article rules ~
Interesting article. I'm in the minority, I'm pretty self aware. I know what I do well and what I do horribly and what skills that I have that are in an. And I do find humour in saying "nu uh, this doesn't relate to me".
Sometimes an opposing viewpoint is unworthy of consideration more than once. Sometimes the proponent of an opposing viewpoint is an unworthy advocate of his view.
One point which is interesting but totally overlooked by the author is that the top quarter of people underestimate their intelligence. Everyone wants to be above average, but not so far from average that they deviate from society norms.
I bet that most people are not exposed to others whom are outside their own competency range. Idiots hang out with idiots and geniuses hang out with geniuses. Therefore they rate themselves relative to their own peer group.
I fall into the bottom quartile. Why are you guys arguing about climate change? The article was written about our inability to accurately asses our intellectual acuity.
No wonder I love history this much... at least people did decent things with their lives. Like have proper jobs.
You are reading a lot of things into the article that aren't even there.
Congrats, you're a case study!
Interesting: Nowhere in the article did I see the results of the author's test scores.
This was a good article until it swung into appeal-to-authority territory with the admonishment about global warming denial. It's true most laypeople don't have the expertise to evaluate the science. But it's also true that the issue is so politically charged and contentious that even a person without expertise has reason to be suspicious of both sides in the debate. I think this is a case of the author overrating her own ability to judge the public's political acumen.
This was a good comment until it swung into the "I don't want to believe in global warming because I assume a political agenda" admonishment about global warming denial denial. I think this is the a case of the commenter completely lacking in self awareness as well as missing the point of the article itself.