If you’ve browsed the comment section of a website, viewed some of the comments left on Facebook, or encountered them in your twitter feed, you’ve met them. Perhaps you’ve even worked with them. As an aphorism that my mother used so many times, “Leë blikke maak die grootste geraas,” if you’ll excuse the Afrikaans. (Translation: Empty vessels make the most noise.)
This observation has been made many times in the past, from such wide-ranging luminaries as Confucius (“Real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance”) to Charles Darwin (“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge”), William Sharespeare (“The Foole doth thinke he is wise, but the wiseman knows himselfe to be a Foole”) up to scholars such as Bertrand Russell, who pointed out that, “One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.”
But as with any aphorism, these cannot be accepted as fact without being examined via that infallible method we have for discerning truth, the Scientific Method. And after years of simply being an aphorism, this finally changed in 1999, when Justin Kruger and David Dunning of Cornell University published their paper titled “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead To Inflated Self-Assessments.”
In this paper, they showed by experimentation that those people who do not have a requisite competence in a specific task lack the skill and competence to adequately grade themselves at that task, and thus consider themselves much more competent at that task than they really are! In their words, “This overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.”
This cognitive bias has come to be known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and besides its relative ubiquity in our lives, this effect also has a profound influence on businesses that rely on employee self-assessments. After all, an incompetent employee is not only incompetent, but does not have the competence required to recognize his or her own incompetence.
Further research by Ames and Kammrath found that the Dunning-Kruger effect is compounded by personality traits such as narcissism and extroversion, though self-esteem and gender had no impact. Of course, the Dunning-Kruger effect also showed that this effect worked in reverse for the highly competent. Those who score high on the tests consistently underestimated their own performance. After all, those who found the tasks easy, thought they would also be easy for others. This usually manifests as ‘Impostor syndrome’ where high achievers fail to recognize their talents as other must naturally be just as good.
Needless to say, this implies that employee self-assessments are naturally flawed – the incompetent would rate themselves highly, while the exceptionally gifted would tend to rate themselves lower. And if companies think that perhaps management evaluating workers would be better, then they have not evaluated the Peter Principle to its fullest extent.
After all, if people are inevitably promoted to a position just above their level of competence, then it follows logically that the people who have to evaluate the performance of their employees are likely not to have the competence to do it.
Dunning and Kruger even showed that with a little help, people could gain the competence required to recognize their lack of skill. But the root cause appears to be another aphorism, namely “if you can’t say anything good, say nothing at all.” After all, if no one tells you you’re not competent, how will you realize it when you lack the skills to recognize that fact? Dunning’s advice was “Get them to make an overconfident display, and then expose it for what it is, so that people are more on guard for such an issue.”
Of course, while it is easy to judge the mistakes of others, one should never be tempted to think that the Dunning-Kruger effect does not apply to yourself. The problem of unrecognized ignorance affects us all. And, after all, psychology is only tangentially related to my field of expertise, and I might have missed some nuances, misunderstood an important point, or left it out completely! And I’m just as sure an enterprising reader will advise me of such and correct me if need be.
Though, to be fair, it was the great Isaac Asimov that said, "People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do."
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