This is why stupid people think they know everything.

this video was sponsored by brilliant if you're like me you know more about managing critically ill patients than doctors and scientists who've dedicated their entire careers to it and so you should drink dunning krueger it's the only choice for the self-educated gentleman krueger it'll give you confidence although i don't think you need any help with that cheers krueger for those who think they know better hello and welcome to driving on salvia i'm eric your host now today we're going to take when i was a freshman in high school i got my first taste of video editing now i'm dating myself here but this was before everybody had you know a camera in their pocket now don't get me wrong i grew up around video cameras all my life my dad took a lot of home videos but well the idea of cutting together mini dv film back then just it's not exactly easy but around that time digital cameras were becoming more popular and less expensive and my older brother who was in college just so i happened to spend a big chunk of change to get his hands on one it was a pretty nice camera i mean it had a night vision mode uh i never got to use it myself but i saw how easy it was to pull those digital files onto a computer and manipulate them and this was like mind-blowing you know i was obsessed with movies and so the idea of making one just seems so cool so surprise surprise i eventually got my own digital camera i think my parents made it a combined christmas and birthday present that year no night vision on this one and for being honest it was primarily a digital photo camera but uh i had a movie function so with that i went to town i was serious i started making short films with my little brother in our bedroom and then i took it a step further and i started making short films in the living room i made videos by myself i made videos with friends when i got to college i convinced a few of my spanish teachers to let me make a video instead of writing an essay i started to dabble in visual effects and made stuff like this it was at this point that i thought to myself and excuse the language but i thought to myself i am the i am amazing at this i've got friends asking me to make their music videos i'm probably one of the best visual effects artists for my age and maybe i should change career prospects and go into film but let's be honest these videos they're crap i mean they're cute because it's a younger version of me but also cringe and believe it or not when i made these videos i thought they were the best things in sliced bread i would take every opportunity to show them off to people i was so proud of the stuff that i made but i had zero clue of how truly incompetent i really was now this changed over time as i gained more experience through college and grad school i started to appreciate how much there was still to learn but it wasn't until i unabashedly entered a competition in san diego where i had to make a film in 48 hours that reality really came crashing down i walked out of the theater after watching everyone else's films and honestly thought that mine was by far the worst i won zero awards and i thought to myself wow i am completely out of my depth and i really need to reevaluate everything i've ever made you see i'd fallen victim to the dunning-kruger effect put simply the dunning-kruger effect is when a person wrongly overestimates their knowledge or capability in a particular area because they're just unaware of how much they do not know in other words incompetent people think they know everything kind of it's actually a little bit more complicated than that but to fully understand the dunning-kruger effect we'll need to nerd out on some of the research that discovered this phenomenon [Music] in the late 90s justin kruger and david dunning started conducting a few tests you see they were perplexed by a recent bank robbery a man named macarthur wheeler walked into two pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight without trying to disguise his face or hide himself in any way unsurprisingly he was arrested shortly after surveillance footage went out on the nightly news after the police brought him into the station later on they played him the tapes from the bank that clearly showed his face and he was perplexed he was in disbelief he said but i wore the juice sadly but also hilariously apparently he thought that squirting some lemon juice on himself before entering into the bank would erase his face and make it invisible to the cameras unfortunately that's not how this works right but why did he think this well apparently he was familiar enough with the idea of using lemon juice as an invisible ink that he thought that this would make him invisible to the cameras that is unless someone decided to take an iron to his face well that's supposed to say wow but uh i guess it doesn't work that well as an invisible ink either they make it look so easy online but from this unfortunate situation dunny and krueger wonder to themselves do incompetent people not realize how incompetent they really are do inept people think that they're doing just fine to answer these questions they devised a test they wanted to know if people who are less skilled know it so they got 65 college students to answer a 30 item questionnaire where they where they rated jokes on a scale from 1 to 11 and then those jokes were separately rated by professional comedians uh although one of the comedian scores was thrown out because apparently their sense of humor was too different and then the students had to rate themselves and determine how good they thought their sense of humor was compared to other college students okay i'm not going to lie this first study did get usable results that supported their hypothesis but the design was pretty awful humor is such an ambiguous thing to study and they're not even comparing a student's sense of humor against other students i mean even the professional comedians didn't have the same sense of humor so it's clear that it's pretty subjective luckily it seems that dunning and kruger realized their mistakes because they went on to conduct three more studies that vastly improved upon themselves so we're going to focus on those ones instead first off they changed what they were evaluating so instead of humor they used logical reasoning and grammar which are much more objective i would say at least comparatively speaking they also asked participants several more follow-up questions after the test to make sure that they were studying what they wanted to study so you know if you're evaluating yourself or rating yourself against your peers and you're ranking yourself highly that could mean that you're overestimating your own skills or it could mean that you're underestimating the skills of others so to resolve this issue participants were asked to estimate how many questions they thought they got right this allowed dunning and kruger to examine whether people were truly miscalibrating the performance what resulted from these studies were graphs that look like this you can see that in general all participants thought they did pretty well i mean they're ranking themselves in the upper 50 to 75 percent range but obviously that's not possible nor is it the case see despite performing quite poorly the bottom half of participants significantly overestimated both their perceived ability and their perceived performance meanwhile the highest performers the folks in that upper quartile underestimated both their ability and performance it's weird but the folks that are in that third quartile seem to have the most accurate perception of themselves this is the dunning-kruger effect in action you may have seen a graph that looks like this to visualize it it's not necessarily a super accurate representation of every person's experience but it gets the point across what the studies and this graph show are that people who lack the knowledge or wisdom to perform well are often unaware of this fact and as such they're super confident in themselves and their abilities but as you gain experience your estimates become more realistic and you may even underestimate your skill at a higher level you go from hubris to a fast descent in confidence to a more accurate assessment to mastery at the very end dunning and kruger attributed this lack of awareness to a deficit in metacognitive skill which is essentially your level of self-awareness regarding the information that you do or do not know so as dunning so eloquently put it if you're incompetent you can't know you're incompetent the skills you need to produce the right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is damn that's kind of mean i mean it's a very bold claim but luckily they had the data to support this see as a follow-up dunning and kruger had the students from the bottom and the top quartiles so the lowest and the highest performers come back to the lab several weeks later they were then given a packet of five tests that had been completed by participants in the middle two quartiles so the folks that did average and they were asked to grade each test by indicating how many questions their peers had answered correctly afterwards these participants were then given their own test again and were asked to re-evaluate how many questions they got right and then re-rate you know how they thought they performed relative to their peers what they found is that the top performers ranked themselves higher after seeing the tests of their peers because they had the metacognitive skill to realize that they generally did better than their peers but the bottom performers continued to rank themselves just as highly because they lacked that metacognitive skill to gain insight into their own competence as well as the competence of others but dunnigan kruger didn't stop there they wanted to you know put the nail in the coffin regarding their hypothesis so they did one more study where they essentially duplicated everything from the last study so participants were given test questions from the lsat to test their logical reasoning skills and afterwards they were given the same questions to rate themselves compared to their peers and also answered how many questions they thought they got right but then half of the participants were given a short training packet for 10 minutes that described techniques for evaluating logical reasoning answers the other half just did a filler activity that took about the same amount of time afterwards all participants went through their own tests and graded which problems they thought they'd answered correctly or incorrectly and once again they're asked to re-rank themselves compared to their peers and reassess how many questions they thought they got right what the study found was that after only 10 minutes of training the packet was so successful that those who had originally scored in the bottom quartile were just as accurate in monitoring their test performance as those who had scored in the top quartile just that little bit of experience that extra boost of competence cultivated a significant increase in metacognitive skill that made all the difference cool right now i'm sure there's going to be folks in the comments sharing stories about people who very publicly and loud-mouthedly demonstrate the dunning-kruger effect whether that's facebook moms blabbing about ingredients and vaccines that are supposedly deadly toxins or you know gwyneth paltrow telling you what's best for your uterus or donald trump claiming to know anything about black people and while those are easy targets i implore you to examine how you have demonstrated this effect because i'm sure that you have you see although folks will weaponize the dunning-kruger effect to show how stupid someone is falling for the dunning-kruger effect doesn't actually say anything about a person's lack of intelligence rather it reveals a person's lack of competence you can be a smart person and still experience this cognitive bias we are all incompetent at stuff for example uh did you start a new hobby recently i just started making cheese this year and you know i feel pretty good pretty confident in my cheese making ability but through preparing for this video i've come to realize that i'm almost certainly overestimating my talents and i think that i'm a pretty smart guy although maybe i'm overspending myself there too similarly the dunning-kruger effect doesn't actually claim that incompetent people think they're better than competent individuals it only shows that incompetent people think that they're better than they actually are so in other words as an amateur cheese maker i don't believe myself to be better than a cheese master from colby wisconsin who's been doing this for 40 years but i bet i'm better than someone who just started doing this at the same time as me right right people who have this inflated confidence in themselves even above experts in that particular area are at an extreme level of a related but larger cognitive bias called illusory superiority think of this like an umbrella term that the dunning-kruger effect fits underneath so i'm not going to go into detail about it right now but essentially illusory superiority is exactly what it sounds like it's the illusion that people think they're better than they actually are when comparing themselves to others so it explains why most people apparently think that they have above average intelligence or why some folks think that they know better than doctors after googling for five minutes or why i guess six percent of americans think that they could win an unarmed fight against a grizzly bear wow but that's not what we're talking about here so i hope that i've made that point really obvious anyway kruger and particularly dunning have made their careers on this study and that makes sense i mean it was a pretty big deal when it came out but although it seems like an extremely satisfying theory that lines up with our understanding of the world it has come under some scrutiny recently i mean from my own perspective i was pretty miffed to see that the original study totally dismissed gender as a factor worth mentioning same thing for ethnicity i mean given how carelessly they just waved it away my worry is that the population that was studied was a mostly white mostly male college-educated group and that's a pretty narrow band of people to study in fact based on other studies of the dunning-kruger effect it seems that there are indeed cultural differences that significantly impact how people judge their own performance particularly in collectivist societies also i'm sure there are some of you watching right now who are saying i can't relate to this because i think i'm terrible at everything and it's true there are folks who underestimate their abilities across the board even at low competence levels i made a whole video about imposter syndrome which explains why even highly skilled people think that they're under qualified and this can go the other direction too there are folks who continue to overestimate themselves even at high skill levels so clearly the dunning-kruger effect isn't a one-size-fits-all explanation but also and it breaks my heart to say this but also the dunning-kruger effect may not even be real now these remarks have only arisen recently so there's not much supporting evidence but supposedly one scientist was able to reproduce a similar effect using randomized computer generated data if you look at these graphs they look eerily similar this technically should not be possible because you'd expect humans to have patterned specific behaviors but if a computer can reproduce it by assigning a random value for a person's assessment of their abilities then that throws the whole effect into question others have postulated that the dunning-kruger effect is simply the result of the better than average effect in which people just generally think they're better than average at most things and if you're significantly above average well then maybe you'd underestimate yourselves and still see yourself as only better than average we're all just kind of floating in that upper 60 to 70 percent range now that might seem like a less fun explanation but it's absolutely worth exploring this to discern the difference i don't know if the dunning-kruger effect is real or not i mean i want to know the answer to that but regardless of that fact it's clear that us humans tend to be pretty bad at assessing our abilities so my recommendation is that rather than dunking on people with the dunning-kruger effect by saying that they're stupid or ignorant my suggestion is to take a look at yourself i mean it is scary how easily we can convince ourselves of a false reality and it's worrisome how easy it is to believe the advice of an armchair expert even harmful advice because they seem confident in what they're saying but the dunning-kruger effect is avoidable you know we we don't have to live this way so if you're wondering how to overcome it my suggestions are don't rely on your gut learn new logic and reasoning skills take criticism seriously and question your assumptions and your views i mean heck i even encourage you to question what i'm telling you right now in this video that skeptical eye will get you pretty far the main takeaway is just stay curious and open to new things and you'll be just fine i had such a fun time going through the papers for this video on stream over the past couple of weeks and i really appreciate everyone who popped by it was just so great to get your feedback and it seriously helped me think through and explain all of the statistics that were used by dunning and krueger in the research but i wouldn't be able to explain those stats without a foundation in math and science and for that reason i'm excited to tell you about brilliant you may have heard me talk about brilliant before because they've been an awesome sponsor of a few of our other videos it's an interactive website and app built off the principles of active problem solving which means that you're not just watching boring lectures you're learning stuff by doing stuff they have tons of in-depth courses to help you think like a scientist or become a math whiz but for me i was pretty impressed by their course called statistics fundamentals which not only helps you understand stats but also teaches you how people use them to lie to you now you might think that you know enough about math or science but if the dunning-kruger effect teaches us anything is that you can never be too sure so why not start your stats journey with brilliant today go to brilliant.org neurotransmissions and sign up for free and also the first 200 people that go to that link will get 20 off the annual premium subscription if you end up going there i i really appreciate you because it helps us it shows sponsors that were worth supporting in the future and obviously it's good for you too and it shows that you really care about this stuff so thank you all right that's enough of that let's wrap up this video i figured i'd take an opportunity to plug our book uh let me grab it it's called brains explained it's awesome it's available on amazon or wherever books are sold i wrote a lot of sections about how our brains mess up and cause problems like you know why we're so bad at eyewitness testimony or what causes deja vu or how misinformation spread so easily so yeah i mean we are extremely proud of this book and i will say that i very quickly went through the dunning-kruger effect process while writing it it was a lot more work than i expected so anyway i hope you check it out brains explained thanks for coming with me on this journey and for questioning everything that you thought you knew about yourself um i'd love to hear your stories about how you've experienced the dunning-kruger effect and maybe you know we can all bond over our shared incompetence so leave those down in the comments and until next time i'm micah [Music]

Channel: Neuro Transmissions

Views: 44,421

Keywords: dunning-kruger effect, dunning kruger, kruger effect, dunning kreuger, dunning krueger, what is the dunning kruger effect, david dunning, justin kruger, psychology, cognitive bias, education, iq, arrogance, trump, metacognition, effect, ignorant, illusory superiority, fool, stupid, incompetent, inept, dumb, competent, smart, micah caldwell, micah psych, neuro transmissions, neurotransmissions, knowledge, expert, confidence, why do stupid people think they are smart, dunning kruger effect examples

Id: SFvorVFKfeQ

Length: 24min 7sec (1447 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 18 2021