“The enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
- Stephen Hawking
Intelligent individuals are usually filled with doubts and questions, while the people who aren’t as smart are full of confidence, even in matters they may have zero knowledge about. Not only does their incomplete and misguided knowledge lead them to make mistakes, but those exact same deficits also prevent them from recognizing it. This is an example of the Dunning-Kruger effect.
What is the Dunning-Kruger effect? How does this affect us? How do we know when we are falling prey to this effect? All these questions may be jumping in your head right now, and you will surely find an answer to them in this blog.
Named after the psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, it is the overestimation of one's competence. Another example of this effect is taking a multiple-choice test on a topic you barely know anything about. You read the questions and choose the answer which seems the most reasonable, but how will you determine if they’re correct? Without the required knowledge, you can’t evaluate how accurate your responses are.
You may have experienced this effect in your own life, maybe around the dinner table at a family gathering. Throughout the day, a member of your family is spouting off on a topic at length, boldly proclaiming that he is correct and that everyone else is uninformed and their opinions are vacuous. It may be plainly evident to everyone in the room that this person has no idea what he is talking about, yet he prattles on, oblivious to his own ignorance.
In such times misinformation is extremely common, as people believe what they see on the internet and, without verifying it’s accuracy, spread that misinformation to others, leading to people thinking that they know about that topic although they’re wrong. This is what leads to the Dunning-Kruger effect.
The truth is that the Dunning-Kruger effect affects everyone, including you, as no one is an expert at everything. One may be brilliant in a few fields, and still have significant knowledge gaps in others. Some of the smartest people also experience this phenomenon. Thus, the Dunning-Kruger effect isn’t a sign of low intelligence, and the first step to recognizing this effect is being self-aware and learning more about it. We all should be careful, and keep gaining knowledge to prevent, or identify it when it might be at work in your own life.
Comentarios