Have you ever noticed how highly intelligent people aren’t as-sure-as-you-think-they-might-be, while those on the other end of the intelligence scale are over-damn-confident about absolutely everything? Especially about things they know nothing about.

Life is supposed to teach us that the more we learn the more we realize how little we know. Far from making you confident, knowledge is humbling. Those who have not learned this this, or who under-rate knowledge generally, are susceptible to a weakness called the “Dunning-Kruger effect, which says that a little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing.

The Bad News

More specifically, it says that people who have little knowledge think that they know more than they actually know, while people who have more knowledge tend to underestimate that knowledge.

This puts the errors of our youth into better perspective, and perhaps lets us off the hook a bit. Younger people combine lesser knowledge and the confidence of youth. So they often think they are in possession of the ‘new knowledge’, and that this limited knowledge is superior to that of the older generation, who still use email to talk to their friends … As a result they may over-reach and mis-apply their meagre knowledge in practice. Mea Culpa.

Over time the young learn from their mistakes but the Dunning Kruger effect suggests that incompetent people have learned less from their mistakes because they think they know more than they do. There seems to be an inevitable feedback loop here: incompetence causing over-confidence and feeding back into greater incompetence. The feedback loop begs the question. Which came first? The incompetence or the over-confidence?

The fact that some people don’t learn from mistakes is disturbing because we don’t always know who these people are, and we could be suffering from this failing ourselves, and simply not know. Those with some level of self-knowledge should be ready to admit to themselves (ourselves?) that we will all suffer from the Dunning-Krueger effect in some area or other.

Obviously we should always be looking out for any area where we are not as competent as others. We should also look out for, and understand, the notion of defensiveness. If we feel the need to defend ourselves strongly in one particular area, say a technical issue, perhaps we need to review how much we really know about this area. Maybe, just maybe, the people criticizing us have a point. The corollary is that maybe they suffer from over-confidence in their abilities to judge others.

Perhaps we should take a closer look at the old adage about the Patsy (dupe) in the room. It goes like this:

Everyone is talking about the Patsy in the room, and you are in the room, looking for the Patsy, because you don’t yet know who the Patsy is. You’d love to find out who the Patsy is so you can gloat, but guess what? If you still can’t find the Patsy, you’re the Patsy.

The Research

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is backed up with studies which were published in 1999 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The research showed that incompetent individuals consistently overestimate their own level of skill, and completely fail to acknowledge their own inadequacy.

The researchers took students from Cornell University and tested them for skills like logical reasoning and grammar. Each student was asked to self-report on their skill level. When they were shown their actual scores it was clear that the least skilled tended to overestimate themselves, while the skilled people gave a more accurate self-assessment.

Know thyself is a very useful piece of advice here because the researchers then asked the students to estimate their likely rank among the other students. The students with the strong skills did this reasonably accurately, but even after seeing their own raw score the unskilled group still overestimated themselves. Worse than that is that they failed to recognize skills in others.

The Good News

Incompetent people can be trained up on their own skills and they (us?) can then recognize and acknowledge their own previous lack of skills. The training seems to give them the confidence to acknowledge their skills deficit.

This surely has immediate applicability in the performance evaluation process. What it suggests to me is that performance evaluations should focus heavily on the areas where skills are lacking without actually dwelling on the lack of skills.

To achieve this you might end up with performance inflation, but if you have to give someone an average score, which implies competence, and then suggest extensive training, so be it. You can disguise the appraisee’s lack of skills by appearing to set very high standards in employees. “Good work, Mr. Appraisee, but we think we can do better here.”