Why we fail to recognize our own incompetence?
All human beings are unaware that we lack the skill to tell how unskilled and unaware we are.
The Greeks said that knowing thyself is one of the most prime tasks. But research suggests that this is an intrinsically most burdensome task to do. Without the help of other people, we are just not in a position to know ourselves. Often we are guilty of misleading ourselves. So at the end of the day, if you compare what people say about themselves. What you find is that the relationship between their beliefs and reality is often nonexistent.
We are generally bad at self-assessment. Not only it seems that we are bad at assessing ourselves. But we do not feel that way. We perceive the opposite of that. The mistake that we make is that we often think that we are capable of lots of things but we are not.
We are generally bad at self-assessment.
In 1999, David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the two social psychologists, published a research paper in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. That documented how, in many areas of life, incompetent people do not recognize just how incompetent they are. A phenomenon that has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Incompetent people do not recognize just how incompetent they are.
Incompetent people are not in a position to know that they are incompetent in many areas of life. They tend to overestimate their skill levels and they are not good judges of other people’s skills. And this is not about denial or self deception, but people are not in a position to recognize their incompetency. As pointed by Dunning in his article that the very knowledge and skills that are required to be good at task are the same skills that a person needed to recognize that they are unskilled.
For example, to know how skilled or unskilled we are at using rules of Grammar. We must first have the good working knowledge of those rules, which is impossible for if we are not competent. So if a person lacks those abilities, they remain not only bad at that task but ignorant to their own inability.
Another way to think about the problem of incompetency is, we all have a lot of knowledge, a lot of facts and figures, a lot of metaphors in our head. Based on which we come up with a reasonable answers to the problems that we have in front of us. And the issue is, that might be the appropriate answer we can come up with, but that does not prevent that answer to be wrong. And this is because of all the other knowledge that we are not aware of.
One of the ways Dunning describes this is that there is a border between what we know and what we do not. And the one thing we do not know is where that borderline is. Between our knowledge and our ignorance. William Feather once wrote that being educated means “being able to differentiate between what you know and what you don’t.”
“In many cases, incompetence does not leave people disoriented, perplexed, or cautious. Instead, the incompetent are often blessed with an inappropriate confidence, buoyed by something that feels to them like knowledge.” — David Dunning
You can listen to this Podcast to learn more about The Dunning-Kruger Effect.
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