I’ve just read a paper titled “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments” by Justin Kruger and David Dunning out of Cornell.
Scary takeaways:
- “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 realise it.”
- “One reason is that people seldom receive negative feedback about their skills and abilities from others in everyday life; . . 2) some tasks and settings preclude people from receiving self-correcting information that would reveal the suboptimal nature of their decisions; 3) even if people receive negative feedback they still must come to an accurate understanding of why that failure has occurred.”
- “. . . incompetent individuals fail to gain insight into their own incompetence by observing the behaviour of other people” (ie, they may be unable to learn from example. pR).
- “. . . 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”. (That comment evoked memories of John Kennedy Toole’s “A Confederacy of Dunces” pR).
- “One puzzling aspect of our results is how the incompetent fail, through life experience, to learn that they are unskilled. Sullivan in 1953 marvelled at ‘the failure of learning which has left their capacity for fantastic, self-centered delusions so utterly unaffected by a life-long history of educative events‘.” (ie, . . . and, they may be unable to learn from experience. That does not leave many other avenues for learning! pR)
Facts:
- The lowest quartile of incompetent people in any domain (that could be you or me in archaeological restoration when it comes to reattaching King Tutankhamun’s broken beard, for example) vastly overestimate their competence. With a demonstrated competence of 13% they estimate their competence at around 66%. Even when subsequently shown examples of competence, they can’t use those examples to recalibrate their estimate for greater accuracy and tend to re-estimate their competence – upwards!
- Those in the third quartile come closest to accurate self assessment, but even those people are only around 55% competent in fact and self estimation.
- Those in the fourth quartile tend to underestimate their actual competence and overestimate the competence of their peers. Their gap between real and perceived competence is only about one quarter of the size of that for the lowest percentile.
“The problem with failure is that it is subject to more attributional ambiguity than success. For success to occur, many things must go right: The person must be skilled, apply effort, and perhaps be a bit lucky. For failure to occur, the lack of any one of these components is sufficient. Because of this, even if people receive feedback that points to a lack of skill, they may attribute it so some other factor” (luck, timing, the economy, my dog ate my homework. pR).
As has been observed by some wiser heads: “I never learned anything particularly useful from any of my successes. My failures, on the other hand, . . . ”
The implications for those employing others to carry out tasks and deliver results are sobering. Kruger and Dunning’s paper is worth reading and then maybe asking ourselves something like, “So, what do I need to do differently to put myself into a better position to deliver results through others?”
