A thought a day (#2)
Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge — Charles Darwin
If I asked you, “What’s the relationship between confidence and competence?”, the likely answer you will first come to is that confidence comes with competence.
If I gave you a little more time, you might start to look around and see that actually confidence is a poor predictor of competence.
Today’s thought is part one of spending some time reading up on the Dunning-Kruger effect.
Google “Dunning-Kruger Effect” and you will see very similar charts to the one above (I am still looking for the source of this chart, since the charts in the paper are a little different and I wish to write about that in part two).
The main premise is, that when a person knows very little about something, that makes it hard for them to realise that they are ignorant (ignorance about being ignorant) and thus they have a false sense of confidence that they know as much (actually a little higher) about a subject matter that most people do (annotated as “Mount Stupid” in the chart, though I’m not too fond of that name).
Once a person achieves a level of competency in that subject matter, they start to be able to assess more correctly how competent they are, and it drops into the “Valley of Despair” where all you can see if everything you don’t yet know. This is a correction of the earlier over-confidence.
Past the “Valley of Despair” is a more linear relationship of confidence and competence, which probably explains why we innately still believe this linear relationship can be applied broadly.
What this chart doesn’t show, that was in the original paper, is that people with high competence always tend to perceive that if they have reached a level of competence, that more others have also achieved the same, underestimating how competent they are (comparatively).
In thinking about what the real life application of this effect might be, I landed on the following:
- Always be most wary of ourselves when we are extremely confident in a topic (especially if we haven’t spent much time on it)
- Find trustworthy experts to give us feedback (self assessments are not accurate)
- Accept that there will be an element of not feeling very confident even in areas we have competence in.
