The Dunning-Kruger Effect - Cognitive Bias - Why Incompetent People Think They Are Competent

Socrates said the only true wisdom is knowing when you know nothing but that's not actually easy for humans to do because our brains want us to think that we are awesome in 1995 McArthur wheeler walked into a bank in Pittsburgh ready to rob it. He didn't wear a mask he didn't have like a fake mustache he was just there robbing a bank in full view of everyone he even smiled at the security cameras before leaving and going to a second bank to rob that one - later that night the security footage allowed the police to pick him up and take him off to jail which shocked him he was shook I wore the juice he famously exclaimed wheeler believed that rubbing lemon juice on his skin would render him invisible to videotape cameras this is a cognitive bias at work and it inspired two psychologists to create some experiments to understand it better cognitive biases are everywhere have you ever met someone who has one like perhaps during a group project at school or during an argument with a stubborn uncle or when you had to toil alongside that co-worker you know the one I'm talking about somebody who believed they knew things but really they didn't believing you know something you don't is called the dunning-kruger effect it's named for the two psychologists who upon hearing about wheelers bank robberies formulated a set of experiments to determine if wheelers Joos beliefs were due to some kind of cognitive bias cognitive biases allow us to convince ourselves that something is true even if the reality is different cognitive biases protect us from reality they let us process information more quickly and they help us make decisions more quickly but that doesn't mean that they are good cognitive biases are essentially a subjective social reality the dunning-kruger effect is in a nutshell a way for everyone to feel good an above average internally because most of us are actually completely average dunning-kruger can help explain why people feel that they're experts even though they know very little about something a problem sometimes described by this graph the vertical axis is confidence and the horizontal is experience imagine someone spent an hour the wikipedia page about global warming then took to twitter to try in school some climate scientists who have literally spent their lives studying it you don't have to imagine this because you know it it happens all the time this cognitive bias is extremely common for example a 1992 survey of the engineers at one company found that 42% of them 42% believed they were in the top 5% of all the engineers at the company but that's not actually possible 42 cannot be 5 another example is driving one study found most people believe that they are above average at driving but most people cannot be above the average another survey of people aged 77 years and older jived with that as well most assuming they were average or above average but again that's not actually possible most people have to be average because that's how statistics work the psychologists who first realized this bias was part of the human fabric did so in for studies humor logic and reasoning and English grammar we'll just take one in the humor study the psychologists asked two groups to rank jokes on a scale of 1 to 11 1 being not at all funny and 11 being very funny group a was a set of average Cornell undergraduates in Group B was a small set of professional comedians the idea was to see if average people would believe that they were above average at picking out what was funny or as good as professionals after group a had ranked the jokes the researchers asked them to compare their ability to pick what was funny against the professional comedians you know to rate themselves and unsurprisingly on average everyone overrated their skills remember 50 is average and the whole group together said that they did 66 which I would rank as an 8 out of 11 on our joke scale but this is where the surprise comes in those who did the worst placed themselves in the 58th percentile on average they believed that they were better than 57 other people out of a hundred their real score the 12th percentile they were worse than 88 other people these were the victims of this newly-discovered cognitive bias the idea that people with a little bit of knowledge or skill in an area believe that they are better than they are Dunning and Kruger went on to show that this bias exists multiple times with different experiments like when assessing effective leadership raising children constructing a solid logical argument and so on generally in each study the participants in the bottom 25% of scores consistently ranked themselves in the 70th percentile it is worth pointing out that self-confidence is extremely important self-esteem is valuable we should all feel good about ourselves that said we should also have a good assessment of what we're good at and what we are not good at for example I'm pretty good at making science videos I am not very good at kung-fu farming or financial policy it's easy to dismiss Dunning Kruger is just over inflated ego but that's not actually what's happening even ego can see its own limits and there are some serious examples of people not even realizing their own failures thanks to this bias these experiments work not just in humor illogical reasoning and rules of grammar but also have been replicated in math skills wine-tasting chess firearm safety among hunters and medical knowledge among surgeons and that's where things get really serious a 74 year old woman awoke from a simple spinal fusion surgery in terrible pain because her surgeon believed himself to be one of the best around instead he's now in prison for life he's accused of maiming multiple patients and causing two deaths meanwhile he claimed quote everybody is doing it wrong and that he was quote the best in the whole state it's pretty amazing that it took us so long to give dunning-kruger a name because it is everywhere the more we look for it the more we see it that said dunning-kruger doesn't apply to everything namely in areas where it's easy to compare baking for example if you assume you're an amazing Baker then you bake a cake and it's inedible it's pretty hard to deny that you're a terrible Baker one paper I read said that most people who play golf don't believe that they are as good as Tiger Woods when surveyed but I would guess if we asked they would still rate themselves above average because an online survey of over 1,700 average adults in Great Britain found that one in eight men believed that they could score a point against Serena Williams the woman ranked number one in tennis for more than six years that said it's very important to point out the dunning-kruger effect is gender neutral it applies to us all interestingly though Dunning Kruger found the people at the top don't overestimate themselves in fact quite the opposite dunning-kruger found the best around tend to rank themselves below their actual performance yeah Nikkei has two parts people in the bottom 25% ranked themselves at near the top and people in the top 25 tend to rank themselves a bit lower than their actual score this can help us understand why it is hard to counter dunning-kruger in order to know you don't know anything you gotta have to know something an example if your cognitive bias has you assume that you're amazing at driving but you only drive it and say rural areas of the desert Southwest how would you ever find out that you're bad at it you would need to drive around others or take classes to learn good driving habits or ride with someone who is objectively considered a good driver to see what you're doing wrong and then get that critique and recognize it and then learn you think many of those people who believe they're good drivers are gonna do those things yeah I didn't think so either in a bit of follow-up research Dunning has found people who are low performers in reality are not good at accepting criticism and often don't show interest in self-improvement he told Forbes quote research subjects were willing to criticize their own previous poor skills once they were trained up and could see the difference between their previous poor performance and their new and improved performance but to get them to train up on their own was very unlikely if we never change the knowledge that we assume we have then we can just keep on going thinking we're amazing who doesn't want to do that even if we're not yeh cognitive biases in the end Dunning Kruger is a cognitive bias that can affect anyone and everyone if you're actually above average at any task you might be undervaluing yourself and if your average or below average at some other tasks you're probably assuming you're pretty good in the age of the internet everyone can be a quote-unquote expert we all have access to infinite information our minds are drawn to learn a little bit about a lot of things and that little bit of information is enough to make us weak minded humans feel confident about what we know even when we know nothing and add to that two global platforms of social media and then everyone can feel like an expert and most won't accept any critique let's face it I have probably been one of those people and maybe you have too it's crucial in today's overstimulated world to be able to differentiate a real expert from an overconfident novice and that goes for understanding your value as well the key is know your talent understand your pitfalls take criticism and keep on learning way back in 1871 long before we knew what Dunning Kruger was Charles Darwin wrote ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge and it turns out he was right I wonder if Darwin would have rated himself as being above average on that one thanks so much for watching after school it was awesome to get to work with mark on this I hope y'all liked it if you want to watch more science videos check out my channel uno dos of tres I make a new video every week that scratches that curiosity itch that we all have here's a recent one on the golden ratio and how it's not quite the mystical magical thing that was promised

Channel: After Skool

Views: 1,969,451

Rating: 4.8842587 out of 5

Keywords: dunning-kruger effect, cognitive bias, smart, ignorant, confident, incompetent, arrogance, trace dominguez, after skool

Id: y50i1bI2uN4

Length: 9min 41sec (581 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 01 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/KarlOntario]

I feel like this is becoming well known enough that we need a new effect created to describe people who think they're competent simply because they know what the dunning-kruger effect is.

[u/Aussie-Nerd]

I don't need to watch this, I already know I'm an idiot.

[u/RonGio1]

Shouldn't use stupid in the title as the guy who came up with the Dunning-Kruger effect stresses that it's about ignorance and not stupidity.

[u/M0dusPwnens]

The best part of the Dunning-Kruger effect is that it self-applies.

This effect is not at all simple or uncontroversial in the literature. Yet everyone who knows a little bit about it presents it as if it's simple, established fact. Even if it were, they also usually get significant parts of it wrong.

First, the original study is almost always misrepresented. That big U-shape is fake. That isn't from any paper on this. The actual results of the original study look like this. Crucially, both lines go up. The correlation between perceived ability and test scores is positive, not negative, and not U-shaped. Here is another graph from that paper that shows a slight U-shape, but still remains pretty flat. Here's another flat one. And here's the final one from the paper, which looks much like the first.

Dunning and Kruger did not find that the more incompetent people are, the better they think they are (or that lower performers think they're more capable better than higher performers) - in fact they mostly found the opposite. That isn't what they claimed either - what they claimed was that the lower performers had a larger discrepancy between perceived and actual performance than average performers and higher performers.

And there is also a significant amount of criticism aimed at Dunning and Kruger's explanation for this. Their explanation - that lack of ability at a cognitive task precludes meta-cognitive evaluation of ability - is intuitive, but there are other very plausible explanations too.

A huge component of the results from these experiments can be explained by the self-assessment scores simply regressing to the mean. Notice how much flatter the black line is in that graph. It isn't that lower-capability people lack the ability to self-asses as much as that no one is actually accurately self-assessing much at all - they're mostly just guessing at the mean.

More can be explained if you assume that it's regression to the mean and a positive self-bias on top. So less-capable people regress upwards to the mean, then get an additional boost by the self-bias that drives their estimation even further up, while more-capable people regress downwards to the mean, then get a boost by the self-bias that helps cancel that out. This leaves you with a graph very much like the one above, and there's no need for Dunning and Kruger's meta-cognitive explanation.

There are also persuasive arguments that many of these effects are artifacts of the way the tasks are designed. If you vary the difficulty of the tests, you see different results. In fact, if you make it hard enough, the effect reverses: the people who do worst become the most accurate at self-assessment, and the people who do best wildly overestimate their performance. So it seems it's a lot less to do with a relationship between actual performance and self-assessment, and a lot more to do with people's assumption that if a task seemed easy for them, they probably performed better than others (who might have found it harder), and if a task seemed hard for them, they probably performed worse than others (who might have found it easier). There's probably a task effect here too - most participants in a study like this are going to assume that the test is meant to be of "medium" difficulty, under the assumption that the researchers wouldn't get much out of a test that was relatively easy for everyone.

Don't get Dunning-Krugered by the Dunning-Kruger effect. And be careful about confirmation bias - just because something accords with your intuitions about overconfident incompetent people doesn't mean you should buy into this explanation immediately.

[u/108241]

The reason for drivers that rank themselves above average can also be due to different measures of average.

To an 80 year old driver, they always drive the speed limit, so they're better than all those drivers that are constantly breaking the law by speeding.

To a teenage driver, they constantly drive at 20 over, and have never been in an accident, so they're better than all the people slowly driving the speed limit.

To an alcoholic that drives home drunk 5 nights a week and haven't been in an accident, that takes above average skill.

The problem isn't necessarily with how people rate their own driving ability, but how they are defining "average."

[u/Abomm]

I really don't like the part of the video where he talks about 'average' and 'how statistics work'

More than 50% of people can be above average if the distribution has a left skew. What's impossible is for most people to be above the median.

I agree that it's unlikely for 95% of drivers to be above average but you can't just make that claim without even looking at any data or its distribution (i.e. mean/median number of accidents).

[u/hexydes]

The smarter you are, the more critically you think about things. People are wired to think what they think is right, because they're thinking it. The smarter you are, the more likely you are to realize things like nuance, and you can self-observe to realize times you were wrong in life, instead of just ignoring them.

It also makes it hard to argue with less-intelligent people, because you constantly listen to their side of the issue, and will stop and think honestly about if they might be right. Conversely, they don't care at all about what you're saying, and will gladly shout you down until eventually you just walk away.

Lot of that going around lately, especially with social media...

[u/The-Leprechaun]

Lol, The guy in the video: "I'm pretty good at making science videos".

Meanwhile not understanding how statistics work and clearly not reading the paper by the original authors and just getting his info from wikipedia.

The Dunning-Kruger effect strikes again.

[u/CRANSSBUCLE]

Not to be confused by the Freddy-Krueger effect, that's worse.