Do your real abilities answer your personal assessment of them?
How good are you in managing cash?
And in recognizing the foreign emotions?
How is your health compared to other people you know?
Do you use grammar more correctly than those with medium knowledge?
Proper self-assessment
for competence and skills compared to others
can not only increase our self-esteem.
It helps us understand when to rely on our own decisions and intuition
and when to seek advice.
But psychological research shows that we are not very good
in making accurate self-assessment.
It turns out that we often exaggerate our own abilities.
Researchers call this human propensity –
Effect of Dunning-Krueger.
This effect explains why in more than 100 studies
people show an illusion of superiority.
We consider ourselves to be better than others
to a degree that is unrealistically large.
When engineers-programmers from two companies asked to evaluate their work,
32% of engineers in one company and 42% in the other
placed themselves among the best 5% of their colleagues.
In another study, 88% of US drivers
they felt they had better driving skills than the average.
These are not unusual results.
On average, we are better than most of us
in terms of personal health, leadership skills, ethics, etc.
Especially interesting is that people with the least abilities in a given area
are most likely to overestimate their skills to the greatest extent.
People with poor measured results on logical thinking,
grammar,
financial knowledge,
mathematics,
emotional intelligence,
health (according to laboratory tests)
and chess
are willing to assess their competence on a par with those of real experts.
So who are the most susceptible to this self-deception?
Unfortunately, each of us, because we all have a lack of knowledge,
which we do not know about.
But why is that so?
When psychologists Dunning and Kruger described their observations for the first time in 1999,
they show that people who lack knowledge and skills in a particular area,
are prone to two successive misconduct.
First, they make mistakes and make incorrect decisions.
Secondly, the lack of knowledge that led to the mistakes themselves prevents them from seeing and eliminating them.
In other words, those who perform poorly do not have the necessary knowledge,
to understand how poorly they are.
For example, when the researchers tested
participants in university debates,
teams whose results put them in the lower 25% of the participating teams,
lost almost four out of five meetings.
At the same time they thought they were winning 60% of the debates.
No deep understanding of the rules of debate
students failed to understand when and how often
their arguments are not correct.
The effect of Dunning and Kruger is not an example of our ego blind to our personal weaknesses.
People usually recognize weaknesses when they can notice them.
In a study, students, with an initial poor logical test result,
passed a short course in logic
and after completing it, they quite openly assessed their first test for very weak.
This may be the reason why people with an average level of experience and skill
often have less confidence in their abilities.
They know enough to think that there is still much they do not know.
On the other hand, those who are real experts make much more accurate self-assessments.
However, they are prone to another type of error:
they mistakenly admit that others also have similar expertise.
That’s why people, both ignorant and experts,
are often wrapped in two varieties of wrong self-assessment.
When they lack skills, people can not notice their mistakes.
And when they are extremely competent,
they do not realize how unusually rare their abilities are.
If the Dunning-Krueger Effect is unaware of those whose actions demonstrate it,
what can we do to judge how good we are in different areas?
First, we need to look for the opinion of competent people
and to understand it, whether we are pleased to hear it.
Second, even more importantly, we must not stop learning.
The more knowledgeable and capable we become,
the less gaps in our competence will be.
As the old saying says:
When you argue with ignorance,
first make sure that you are not such.
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