The central proposition in our argument is that incompetent individuals lack the metacognitive skills that enable them to tell how poorly they are performing, and as a result, they come to hold inflated views of their performance and ability…. the way to make incompetent individuals realize their own incompetence is to make them competent.
– Kruger and Dunning (1999): Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments (pdf)
If you don’t know what you’re doing, then it’s quite likely that you don’t know that you don’t know. Kruger and Dunning (1999) did a set of interesting studies to show this to be the case. It explains why people with the least information and knowledge about a subject may feel the most confident to opine about it.
It kind of explains why adolescents know everything. I know that I knew everything when I was 12, and ever since then I’ve been knowing less and less.
Of course there are the less typical teenagers who don’t express the same unaware overconfidence. They can be extremely competent at a particular thing (let’s call it a domain), like writing to take a purely random example, yet are extremely unconfident of their ability.
Well Kruger and Dunning (1999) have an explanation for that too. Competent people tend to think everyone else is competent too, so they tend too underestimate their ability relative to everyone else.
Teachers can easily fall into a similar trap, because we will often, quite unintentionally and unconsciously, assume students know more than they do. This is one of the reasons peer-teaching works so well. Students are more likely to know where their peers are coming from, and what they know to begin with.
The NY Times’ Errol Morris has a great interview with one of this study’s authors.
I’ll end with the most wonderful concluding remarks, which really put this whole study in perspective:
In sum, we present this article as an exploration into why people tend to hold overly optimistic and miscalibrated views about themselves. We propose that those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Although we feel we have done a competent job in making a strong case for this analysis, studying it empirically, and drawing out relevant implications, our thesis leaves us with one haunting worry that we cannot vanquish. That worry is that this article may contain faulty logic, method- ological errors, or poor communication. Let us assure our readers that to the extent this article is imperfect, it is not a sin we have committed knowingly.
—Kruger and Dunning (1999)
This is so timely. I was feeling it last night. It is Darwin Week at the College of Charleston and I took a 9 year old to her first college level lecture on Monday – Blood Sucking Flies. (Awesome!) She asked a question. It was an OK question. Last night however, we went to a Lincoln-Douglas style debate about faith and science. Due to the large number of people at the debate and her tardiness, she sat three rows away from the group and did not receive the instruction given to the others to not ask questions.
Yes, she did.
She was so outclassed by the two speakers – one an eminent physicist and the other a board member of the national humanist society and op-ed writer for the Washington Post. Both were fielding questions from grad students and professors.
She challenged the humanist’s understanding of the writers of the gospels. Sigh. The humanist was kind – it would have been a bit like kicking a kitten to have not been – but he firmly put her in her place.
She could not concept why she wasn’t right and why she didn’t convince him. Sigh.
At least now I understand why.