DUNNING-KRUGER

A remark I heard this week related to the Cincinnati Bengals brought to mind a phenomena that a pair of researches wrote about some 22 years ago.  The remark was, "The Bengals are so young they don't know what they don't know."  I'm sure you may have heard that statement related to other things over the years.  David Dunning and Justin Kruger were authors of a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.  They were writing about a person's ability to self-assess.  I'll write about it here in hopes that you may find it useful in your life.

They ran a lot of tests on people in many different fields;  business, medicine, aviation, and literacy for example.  I'll try to boil it down to keep this brief.  People with little knowledge of a particular new field will quickly assess their own competence in that field much higher than it actually is.  We begin by knowing very little and we know that;  but when we gain a little knowledge, we think we are much better than we actually are.  It happens all the time.  

Think back to when you started driving a car.  On day one, you were not good and you knew it.  After a number of lessons, you gained confidence and soon you thought you were very good.  You weren't.  Hopefully, you made it past this stage without wrecking your car or hurting someone.  We all go through that.  It takes many years of driving before you really are proficient.

If you take up a hobby, something that requires a skill, you go through the same process.  When I started painting pictures, I knew nothing.  I studied and read books and soon I could put out a painting that people at least recognized.  The more I painted the better I got.  Soon, I was sure I was a prodigy.  It wasn't until I had painted a lot that I realized just how poor my work was.  It's the same cycle as above.

These examples are referred to as the Dunning-Kruger Effect.  Keep this in mind for yourself, your children, your workers and those serving you.  Protect against that early over confidence and inflated self-assessment.  Be aware that some people are totally unaware of their limited capabilities;  sadly, some stay that way.  Those people will always find some reason for their failure other than their own incompetence.  Good luck.  Just be aware.