"Why ignorance fails to recognize itself" Featuring David Dunning

[Music] I'd like to kick things off by taking us to let's say the year 1806 when Boston entrepreneur Frederic Tudor decided to sail to the Martinique islands with a precious cargo he had harvested ice from frozen rivers in Massachusetts and he thought he could make a killing selling this to the Islanders in the tropics of the Martinique there was only one small problem in his plan the Islanders had never really ever had a cold drink they did not know about this thing called ice cream nor had they ever really tried anything like refrigeration so they they found this substance to be an interesting curiosity but one of no value and as a consequence is precious value melted away unsold and underappreciated now I bring up the story of Frederic Tudor just to make one point which is that often the fate of events economic or of social events or of human affairs depend not so much and what people know or what people can conceive of but rather depend on what people don't know what they can conceive of what lies beyond their imagination for lack of a better term things that they are ignorant of if you will now as Andrew mentioned I'm a psychologist and my wheelhouse so to speak is the study of human misbelief how people come to believe things that simply aren't true or cannot be true and as soon as you begin to work into this topic you begin to realize that ignorance is the story and towards that end I want to make three points about ignorance today that I think we will find of interest in the intersection between psychology and economics the first point to make about ignorance is uncontroversial I think and that's quite simply that we all live under the shadow of our own inevitable ignorance they're just simply things we don't know either as individuals or as a species I mean Karl Popper pointed out quite eloquently that our knowledge though fantastic is by definition fine but what we don't know is by definition infinite it just extends way far out into the distance I think we can all agree on that what might be a little more controversial is how closely our ignorance begins to ourselves and our daily affairs what I'd like to argue today is that where the boundary line between what we know and what we don't know that boundary line lies well within the geography of our everyday lives it's a boundary line that we may cross several times during our lifetimes or maybe even several times during the day I mean if you take a look for example at magazines newspapers websites every two or three months they are publishing some sort of story of what people usually people means Americans what Americans don't know about their history about their government about financial affairs about health about religion and the headline is actually how little people know but it's the third point that might be the most controversial so I'm going to dwell on it a little bit with data today and that third point about ignorance is this boundary line that lies so close to us by the cruelest irony that turns out to be something that we are ignorant of as well we don't know the times that we walk off the solid ground of our knowledge into the thin air of things we don't know often we may find ourselves actually doubt of ignorance more than knowledge and not know the fact because we don't know the boundary line between what we know and what we don't know we don't know the limits of our knowledge that's the title the talk indicates ignorance often refuses a rather can't recognize itself now but I feel like I need to can do I'm a psychologist so I think feel I have to do a little demonstration of this fact with data there are a number of ways we can take a look at the fact that people don't know the limits of their knowledge here's one simple way that was published about two years ago in which we simply went to people and asked them were they familiar or knowledgeable about these common everyday financial terms and as you can tell they're common everyday financial terms except I want to focus on the last three terms because they're interesting to us because 91% of our respondents said that they were familiar or ineligible about at least one of these topics there's only one problem of that with that these topics don't exist they were things we made up in my office and then went to Google and made sure they don't exist out in the world people don't know exactly where their knowledge ends and where everything else begins or Karl poppers term begins there's a little more complicated but this is in my lab what we're known for another demonstration that people don't necessarily know what they don't know these this is a graph depicting data that came from a study in which we approach students just as they were finishing an exam in a mid-level psychology course at Cornell University hundreds of students and we just simply asked the students how well had they done on the exam that's the first thing we did second thing we did is we asked if we could look up their actual score when the exams were graded and based on that actual score what we did is we sorted people into the bottom 25% of performers the second 25% the third and then finally the top 25% of of performers and basically the blue line indicates how well everybody in each group did now for us what's interesting is relations of the blue line to the two other lines which aren't about how people actually did is about how well people thought they did the red line indicates people's beliefs about their mastery of the course material in general the yellow dotted line indicates how well people thought they did on the actual exam now if you take a look at this graph there are two findings I want to point out actually there are four findings in the graph I just want to point out two of them the first is if you take a look at how people rated their exam performance on average people thinking they think they're doing quite well they're much closer to the top then they are at the bottom of the scale basically what people are doing is they're saying they're above average in their performance that's what the egde person says they're above average that's not a surprise if you ask people about their driving ability their leadership ability they will tend to tell you that they're above average but that can't be for example in one survey of professors 94% of them said they did above-average work now I have many splendid colleagues the figure is not 94% doing above average work that's the first finding the second finding is that if you take a look at bottom performers they're almost as positive and how well they think they're doing in this exam as our top performers they're not as confident but they're almost as confident and they're certainly much more confident in how well they think they've done relative to how well they've actually done and this is a gap that we have looked at quite a bit in my lab this gap between for poor performers how well they think they're doing versus how poorly they're really doing people seem to have when they're for lack of a better term incompetent seem to have very little recognition of how incompetent or how poorly they're doing that gap has come to be known as the dunning-kruger effect for those of you who thought Dunning sounded familiar and it basically refers to the fact that incompetent people do not scratch that cannot know how incompetent they're doing that's the first point I'd like to me the second point I'd like to make is just in Kruger and I did not name it the dunning-kruger effect it was named for us and we've resigned ourselves of the fact that our good family names will be associated with poor performance incompetence ignorance scalability naivete and stupidity and nincompoop awry but so it goes but so it goes now just in case you might think that might be a reflection of youth that people don't know when they're doing poorly we can go to Justin this has been looked at in a number of settings let me just go to a more important classroom let's say let's take a look at a survey over ten years done at the University of Florida Medical School of medical residents going through their OBGYN rotation or clerkship and basically if you take a look you get the same effect here in terms of what grades students think they're going to get particularly if they're doing poorly wrote of the actual grades they're about to receive in through the mail and finally if you're worried that people are being sloppy or just so flattering in terms of the ratings they give themselves we've done studies where we've offered people up to 100 dollars to tell us accurately how well they're doing either in terms of percentile ranking or in terms of raw score and I can tell you that if you offer people up to $100 for that for giving you an accurate impression you get their intention what you don't get is any more accuracy that is you take a look at the green lines these are the perception lines this is the reality line it's almost overlaps completely with the same line that you're getting in the control condition now first question why is it that people don't know the limits of their knowledge in frequently or ignorance fails to recognize itself now there are many stories that I can tell I just want to dwell on one story today because it comes up again in the talk and it come up comes up again in a lot of different ways whenever you're doing this research and that has to do with the fact that quite frankly we have to be upfront about this all of us knows a lot by the time where is 60 years old oh the average English speaker knows 48,000 words can recognize hundreds of people in fact one person one psychologist estimated that humans wrapped around their neurons know about 1.5 times ten to the ninth bits of information but it would behoove heurists to think that all those bits of information are accurate some of them are wrong some of them are misleading some of them lead to misleading conclusions and that turns out to be a problem now in 2014 in my lab but we decided to do the day after the mid the 2014 congressional election was survey about 350 people in terms of what they thought about social conditions and political conditions and economic conditions in the United States and here are four items that we surveyed them on out of the collection of items the total collection as you can see two of the items are rather friendly to a liberal point of view two of the items are friendly to a conservative point of view you might reflect upon the fact which items you think are true and which items are false because true two of those items are true and do those items as of 2014 are false any guesses that's the problem we know a lot of things that are true but we also unfortunately tend to know a lot of things that are false and that has implications for what we think about ourselves and for our decisions that is it's not a surprise in our survey that if you took a look at conservative facts the facts that leaned toward a conservative point of view conservatives were much more likely to endorse them as true than liberals and you got a reflection of that for liberal facts liberals were much more likely to endorse them as true relative to conservatives but what's interesting is the following the blue part of the bar indicates those facts that are actually true the red bar indicates those things that are actually false and about 35 to 40 percent of what respondents on each side indicated is true actually was to monstera be false if you went and you looked at the relevant statistics for example we know a lot of things it's remarkable what we know it would be Hoover's to think that they're all right but here's the problem if you take a look at how we treat the things that we know that are wrong you get into an issue now one of the things we did in this study is we asked people how well-informed of voter they were and then look to see how that related to how well they done our little political quiz and I the first thing I can tell you is those people who got more right actually rated themselves as more well-informed than those people who didn't so people have some handle on some form of their knowledge about political affairs and what's also good is when a person said I don't know the answer to that question they rated themselves as less informed of a voter those two those graphs are or weights are straightforward what's important though is what happens when people gave a demonstrably wrong answer to our question what happened is they gave that positive weight that is the extent that our respondents gave an answer that was wrong they also tended to consider themselves as a more informed voter so the problem with self perception is we give ourselves almost as much credit for our wrong ideas as we do to our right ideas now what sort of implications does this idea have either the general idea or the specific idea well the accent on the conferences on education and I think the fact that ignorance tends not to recognize itself does have a tremendous reveals a tremendous issue that we have to deal with Bohr I think as educators which is illustrated by data that actually comes out of a class that I taught about two years ago at Cornell University the topic was psych in law and what we did is we simply in the first week of the class asked people were they familiar with these psycho legal terms that we were going to ultimately talk about in class of course some of those terms were not real we made them up in my in my office so any familiarity that people expressed had to be wrong and it turned out in the first week of class about 40% of these fake items or recognized or rather students said they knew something about them both in my class and in a control class now the question becomes what happens when we return the students at the end of the class what have we taught or what have I taught the students in this instance in the end we basically gave the same questionnaire and the control class nothing much else different happened in my class of the items we'd actually talked about in class I'm pleased to tell you that students express familiarity and knowledge with over 90% of those items I'm very very happy about that I am unhappy about the fact that the fake items almost 90% of students or knifes and the time endorsed a knowledge of these items that we ideas concepts we never touched in class so either my students are very over over-exuberant in their learning or I'm overly exuberant in my teaching but I think what this is is a demonstration of one thing whenever we're educators our aim is to fill people with knowledge but sometimes we can fill them with a misapprehension of what they have learned we can fill them with overconfidence if we're not careful in the ways that we instruct people and this is perhaps one demonstration of that and that does suggest different ways of approaching teaching right now in educational psychology instructors we need to realize that the real problem of teaching people isn't so much being able to efficiently fill their heads with knowledge but rather recognizing that students don't walk in as blank slates they walk in with messy apprehensions they can walk in with misconceptions and those misconceptions often are tremendous barriers to the students learning anything new that you have to offer them for example in psychology the the classic misconception that we only use 10% of our brains is still out there many people believe that can't be true the brain uses too much oxygen and calories too luxurious to be such a lazy organ but in order to really talk about how the brain works you do have to address confront and ultimately refute misconceptions that are like that or the misconception that we only have five senses we actually many more than five senses and this has been shown by researchers this is data from one study that was done teaching high school psychology in Tampa Florida where what they did is they instituted a unit in which they surveyed identified and then refuted misconceptions students had about psychological topics and then went ahead and taught the new stuff and what they found is if they went through if they instituted a reputational style of teaching they actually got more information gained more learning on the part of students then compared to a standard they're a standard way of teaching the material or a control condition in which students didn't receive the material altogether one things we have to worry about or the misconceptions our students have if you don't pay attention to them well students may not necessarily pay attention to you in the way that you're thinking that's one implication the second implication that I think it's important to think about is in terms of policy which is the extent that psychologists or economists are interested in policy there is a problem which is what if you instituted a policy but no one knew of it they remained ignorant of it will your policy be effective one of the most effective policies for alleviating poverty in the last few decades has been the institution of the Earned Income Tax Credit this is a program in which poor families can earn up to six thousand dollars simply by filing a tax return does amazing stuff in terms of alleviating poverty the issue with it is that if you ask the IRS the IRS will tell you that one out of every five people who are eligible don't bother to participate in the program and you can ask the question why do one out of five people who are eligible when there's money on the table why do they fail to take part it turns out when you do the study and the study was published in the American Economic Review about two years ago but it's not the stigma of applying for it that doesn't appear to be a problem whatsoever or that people think it's too effortful to apply for the Earned Income Tax Credit that doesn't seem to be the issue they simply don't know about the Earned Income Tax Credit it remains something that they don't know exists or they don't know that they're eligible for and in fact in this study published in a er what the researchers did was simply inform in a very simple brochure thirty-five thousand non applicants that this program existed and that caused 23% of them to sign up for the program the next time came around if they also included a simple way for the recipient to figure out how much money they could earn take up increase by 33% one of the problems we have often in thinking about the effect of the effectiveness or the efficiency of things that we're trying to do is recognizing the fact that there is a silent opponent that might be opposing us and that is the opponent of ignorance something that a psychologist I think we're beginning to consider more and more now my time is short so I want to leave you with just one last word and that last word is hypo cognition and if you don't know what that word means or you have no idea never heard it before congratulations you've just experienced hypo cognition hypo cognition is the state of not having a cognitive or linguistic representation for some thing some object some idea or some concept like the Martinique Islanders didn't have a concept of ice or its uses they were hypo cognitive of the idea of ice the more psychologists play around with this idea of hypo cognition that ignorant matters and not only that ignorance of ignorance matters we find something incredibly fascinating interesting paradoxical humorous and sometimes very distressing stories to tell and maybe what I can do is invite economists also to think about this idea of hypo cognition one can assume complete information or potentially one can presume no information and see how that would play out in various models in various settings that might be out there in the world I imagine there is some amazing distressing humorous paradoxical interesting stories to find out by assuming ignorance or hypo cognition out there though I have to concede that I have no idea what they might be let me in there [Applause] [Music]

Channel: Macmillan Learning

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Length: 22min 21sec (1341 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 30 2017