Dunning-Kruger Effect Why you might know just enough to be dangerous

Ever notice how novices tend to be highly opinionated, while those with more experience are a little less sure? In this episode, Mel and Dan unpack the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and why your social media feed is often so infuriating.

Mel: 00:16 Hi, and welcome to Bad Decisions.

Dan: 00:18 The show that helps us understand why we choose what we choose.

Mel: 00:21 Why we think what we think.

Dan: 00:22 And how to exploit this stuff for fun and commercial gain.

Mel: 00:25 I feel like we've forgotten to say ethically. Ethically.

Dan: 00:27 I never forget ethically. It's hardwired in.

Mel: 00:30 Speaking of ethics, I'm Dr. Mel Weinberg. I'm a performance psychologist.

Dan: 00:34 What does that leave for me? And speaking of performance, I'm Dan Monheit, co-founder of Hardhat. And speaking of great tracks, here's Cops.

Dan: 00:49 All right. So we have got a, I think we've got a mega show today, a disproportionately large show today, not in length, but maybe in terms of insight. I'm overcooking this. Look, I'm just going to tell you what's up, Mel. Do you know what's up, Mel?

Mel: 01:02 What's up? I'm scared.

Dan: 01:05 This is show 31 and I think there's certain heuristics that you learn that reveal more of the world to you than others. And I think today's heuristic is one where once you see this, you're like, "Oh my god, so many things that didn't make sense, now makes sense." I feel like the licensing effect was one of these for me.

Mel: 01:23 Yeah. I feel like this is sort of the reason that we haven't gotten to this until this point. I think we've waited to episode 31 because we've sort of thought that this is just so big that we don't even know, it's going to blow your mind.

Dan: 01:37 Oh, well, I'm glad I'm not the only one overselling this. All right. So today we are talking about a heuristic that makes the idiots loud and proud, and the experts kind of quiet and not so sure. Dr. Mel, what are we talking about today?

Mel: 01:50 Most people may be familiar with this. It's probably one of the most famous heuristics out there. And it's called the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Speaker 3: 01:59 Mr. Simpson, I'm afraid you have a crayon lodged in your brain.

Dan: 02:03 The what?

Mel: 02:05 That's right. The Dunning-Kruger effect named after, you guessed it, Mr. Dunning and Mr. Kruger.

Dan: 02:11 All right, let's do this, Dr. Mel. What do we got?

Mel: 02:13 Okay. So the Dunning-Kruger effect named after David Dunning and Justin Kruger, who wrote the seminal paper on this-

Dan: 02:19 Double D and JK. Sorry, couldn't help myself.

Mel: 02:22 Back in 1999, the Dunning-Kruger effect basically has two parts to it. The first part is that it explains that people with low levels of ability tend to overestimate their performance on certain tasks. You know the idea that people who aren't very intelligent, aren't actually intelligent enough to know that they're not intelligent?

Dan: 02:47 Yeah. Yeah. It's like, "You're so stupid. You don't even know how stupid stupid is."

Mel: 02:51 Exactly. And so, I think that people can relate to this and people are familiar with this idea. The other side of the Dunning-Kruger effect and perhaps the more unfortunate side is that people who actually have high levels of ability tend to underestimate their performance compared to others.

Dan: 03:06 Oh, so, in the same way, like, "So stupid, you don't even know how stupid stupid is." It's like the smart people actually know so much that they realize how much they don't know, which makes them think they don't actually know very much at all, when relative to other people, they kind of do.

Mel: 03:18 Exactly. You got it.

Dan: 03:20 This is a continuum, right?

Mel: 03:21 Well, essentially that people fall along this continuum. I guess there's two dimensions to it. There's a dimension of your actual ability and there's a dimension of your perceived ability. And this is what Dunning and Kruger and then their buddies kept looking at in the series of studies and one in particular in 2003, where they asked the-

Dan: 03:39 Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Are you about to go into research?

Mel: 03:42 Yeah.

Dan: 03:43 Mel, you know what happens.

Mel: 03:45 Okay, play the music.

Dan: 03:52 You're welcome, Cops. Okay. Now, as you were saying.

Mel: 03:55 So in their 2003 study, what they did was they had 141 students in an exam. But on the way out of the exam, they asked people to say, "Hey, how'd you think you went compared to everybody else?" And what they actually plotted was people's actual performance on the exam and how they thought they went. And what they found, unfortunately, was that the students who didn't do particularly well on the test, certainly overestimated their ability compared to others. Whereas for people who actually were the high performers, they underestimated how they went compared to everybody else. So they showed this really neatly.

Dan: 04:31 Yeah. I totally remember this from school where it's like the dumb kids all think it's going to be fine. And the kids that are really smart, always came out of the test being like, "Oh, I'm not sure how well I did." And it's like, "Shut up. You know you did well."

Mel: 04:41 Yeah. And that's exactly what it is. And it's not only the case for sort of certain specific tests of ability or intelligence like this. We see this in other domains as well. So, one of their studies was on humor. People who aren't funny, don't know enough about what comedy involves, to know that they're not funny. So people who aren't funny think they're hilarious, and people who are really clever and witty will second-guess their jokes before they get up on stage. So the real comedians, I don't know if we're ever really getting to see them.

Dan: 05:14 So I think what's cool about what you're saying is that there's some interesting and very consistent graphs about how this works on the internet. And so if you imagine a normal sort of two-by-two axes, and on one side, you've got confidence, on the other side, you've got competence. At the start, you don't know anything about anything. And so, you're pretty much at zero for both. And then what seems to happen is we learn a little bit. So our competence goes up a touch, but our confidence goes through the roof because we've just caught our first wave surfing, or we've just driven the car around the block for the first time. And we feel like, "Oh my god, this is so easy. I can literally do this all day, every day. Everyone else is stupid."

Mel: 05:50 There is a term for this. Yeah, for people who have a little bit of competence, but a whole lot of confidence, this is called sitting on top of Mount Stupid.

Dan: 05:57 Right, it makes sense.

Mel: 05:58 Not my term.

Dan: 06:00 Because you've just shot straight up to it and we know what's happening next. Next is you take a very, very deep slide, basically off a cliff, into the trough of despair, because what happens is you get a little bit more knowledge. And you have to now overtake a car in the wet or do a hook turn or you're driving next to a tram or whatever it is. And you realize, "Oh my god, I just got a tiny bit more competence, but that has completely shot my confidence. And actually, oh my god, this is really hard. I don't know anything. I suck at this. I'm never going to be able to drive, surf, play golf, harmonica," whatever it is you happen to do. This trough of despair seems like it can go on for a while until, Mel, something happens.

Mel: 06:37 What happens next?

Dan: 06:38 Well, then we get to enjoy the slow gradual climb up the hill of enlightenment, where you do start getting more confident and also more competent at the same time, until you're basically at a point where you know a whole lot, but think there's actually so much more to know.

Mel: 06:56 Yeah. And I think this distinction between your level of confidence and your level of competence, that's critical to the Dunning-Kruger effect. That's essentially what it's all about.

Dan: 07:05 It's the whole thing. I think when we talk about it like this, what we realize is, as a person, you are not on the Dunning-Kruger line somewhere. You are somewhere on this journey in every facet of your life. Some aspect of confidence to competence, no matter what it is that you're doing. I think we all get to experience this in different ways.

Dan: 07:25 So we've all been through this in a very task level. So you learn a new skill, you learn a new task. So, as I said before, maybe it's driving or riding a bike or playing the flute. And you go through that thing of like, "Wow, this is really hard. Oh my god. This is so easy. Oh no, this is actually impossible. I'm okay at it now." But also at a more macro level. And I don't know if this happens for you guys in academia or psychology or all of the other wonderful things that you do. But I think this happens over the course of our career as well.

Mel: 07:54 What do you mean?

Dan: 07:55 It's probably like an unfair label that gets thrown on millennials or Gen Z or whatever up to now, but kids coming into the workforce and thinking that they know everything.

Mel: 08:02 Of the entitlement?

Dan: 08:02 Well, entitlement, and, "I know everything,"

Mel: 08:02 The arrogance.

Dan: 08:06 "I can do my boss' job." The arrogance. How dare they? But from their perspective, you can see that they're just at their... What's that thing called? The peak of... you're at the top of Mount, whatever you say.

Mel: 08:14 They're just sitting right at top of Mount Stupid, having a picnic up there.

Dan: 08:17 Yeah. Because you've just come out of uni. You've done pretty well. You've landed a job. Your confidence is sky high. And you're so stupid. You don't even know how stupid stupid is. You don't even realize all the things you don't know yet. And so, in our careers, I think it's easy for us to feel like we know everything so early on. And it is often not until we've been around the circuit a few times and maybe we're two or five or 10 or 15 or 20 years into our career that we actually appreciate how much there is to know. And not only how little do we know now, but, "Oh my god, how little did I know when I was in my first six months, thinking I could run this place."

Mel: 08:51 So, that makes me think, who's pitched a tent and has been camping on top of Mount Stupid for years?

Dan: 08:57 Who's that?

Mel: 08:58 All those people who try out for American Idol, who you see in the first few weeks of auditions.

Mel: 09:06 (singing).

Mel: 09:16 The people who are awful singers. And yet nobody's ever actually told them that they're awful. And they think that they're really good, but they're not good enough to know how bad they are.

Dan: 09:27 Yeah. It's like that. So stupid, you don't even know how stupid stupid is. It's like, not only are you bad at singing, but you're so bad at singing that you don't even realise all of the things that you suck at. There's so many different ways that you suck.

Mel: 09:39 This is called the double curse, right? The idea that not only are you bad at something, but you don't even know how bad you are. Shame.

Dan: 09:47 Shame. But you know what? I think if it wasn't for the Dunning-Kruger effect, probably nothing would happen. Because I think that false sense of security is enough to... or false sense of confidence is enough to get you to start. And if you really knew how hard it was going to be to learn the cello or Mandarin or whatever it is you want to do, god, we probably would never bother. So absolutely, we see this in reality TV shows. We absolutely see this with our politicians, who know not much about lots and are very happy to speak very confidently and proudly about the little bits that they know. What about in your world, Mel?

Mel: 10:23 I guess it makes me think, the idea of Dunning-Kruger is closely related to what's called the above-average effect, which is the tendency of the average person to believe that he or she is above-average. For example, I see this in my well-being research and psychology all the time that it is essentially pretty well-understood that about 75% of the population think that they're happier than everybody else. And I'm not sure how much people can figure it out. This is not complex statistics, but it doesn't quite make sense that the majority of people can feel that they're more competent or happier or better than everybody else.

Dan: 10:58 But what good can possibly come of telling people, "Don't but don't," but nothing good can come of telling people that they're not as happy as they think they are. Going to ruin everything.

Mel: 11:07 Yeah. It's such a killjoy, I know.

Dan: 11:08 I know. I'm sorry to inform you, but you're actually less happy than you think you are. Sorry.

Mel: 11:14 Yeah, you should go see somebody.

Dan: 11:17 Here's my card.

Mel: 11:18 Exactly.

Dan: 11:18 I see what you're doing, yeah.

Mel: 11:20 See? I do own marketing.

Dan: 11:22 Good, good, good segue. You know we practice ethical marketing on this show. Mel, I'm going to have to talk to you about this afterwards.

Mel: 11:28 Wow.

Dan: 11:31 It's a good transition point to talk about. If this is a thing that we just see in the world. People are dealing with the Dunning-Kruger effect as they go in and out of categories. What on earth are we meant to do about this as the brand that service these people? And I think, Mel, if it's okay with you, what I would love to do is talk very quickly about two different situations that we might find ourselves in as brands or as salespeople or as marketers. One is people right at the top of Mount Stupid. People who are rushing into a new category they don't know anything about. And then I've sort of got some thoughts on people right in that trough of disappointment. Is that all right?

Mel: 12:09 There's nothing I'd rather learn more about right now.

Dan: 12:12 So nice. All right. Finally, after all these episodes, finally a compliment. Mark that one up.

Dan: 12:17 When we talk about people at the top of Mount Stupid, this is a classic salesperson's dilemma. So let's say you are a salesperson working in a... I'll do something easy for me, like a high-end bike store. And you get somebody coming in who has been for one ride on their friend's bike. And now they have $12,000 to basically give you to buy a bike that is the same as the one that belongs to their friend that they've just ridden. And this is classic salesperson's dilemma, right? Because it's like, you know this person has no idea what they're doing. They are camping out at the top of that mountain, thinking they know everything. And they are about to purchase something that you know is going to end badly. It's probably not the right bike for them if it's their first bike.

Dan: 13:02 So you have two choices. One is just get out of the way, take their money, give them the bike, and wish them a nice day. Good short-term result. But the reality is if your time horizon is anything more than one day, there's probably a better long-term solution. And like as any good salesperson would tell you, rather than taking their money and running, if you accept that they are inevitably going to come crashing down off that hill, not on the bike, but off that competence curve. And eventually realize that that was probably not the right thing to have bought, you would be well-served to take it upon yourself to gently escort them down that cliff face, help maybe interrogate their purchase decision a little more, find out what they're interested in, share a little bit of information, not overwhelm them, but share enough information to start showing them some of the things they may not have considered, and perhaps guide them to a purchase that is more appropriate, which might mean less revenue in the immediate term, but will, without a doubt, result in better goodwill, a better long-term customer and probably better word-of-mouth as well.

Mel: 14:00 I think this is a really delicate situation to manage, right? You're right when you call it a dilemma, because you need to be really careful in how you pitch this to the customer. Because I imagined that if their level of knowledge about something is quite simple and you start to tell them about all the wonderful features of this $12,000 bike that they didn't even know they needed, then you're all of a sudden going to overwhelm them very quickly and they'll end up making no purchase at all.

Dan: 14:26 It is really delicate because the last thing you want to do is talk somebody out of spending $15,000 with you. It just went up from 12,000 to 15, but that's what happens with bikes. You just literally blink and now it's $3,000 more. So, it is really delicate and you certainly don't want to leave the person feeling like they can't give you their money. Because they'll just find someone else they can give it to.

Dan: 14:43 So, I mean, when this happens, in our sense, when a prospective client comes to me and wants to buy something that is just completely the wrong thing for them, I will always tell them, "You can absolutely give me money to do that. Of course, I will take your money and make that campaign, build that website, make that, produce that content, whatever you want. But before I do, let me just go through a couple of questions to make sure it's actually the right thing to do." And you can usually get them to come to their own conclusion that, "Okay, there might be a better way of directing my energy or budget."

Mel: 15:13 I love it when you talk about ethical principles of marketing.

Dan: 15:16 We're in it for a long time, not just a good time. So, that's once. I think it's the job of a good salesperson and maybe of a good ad to slowly escort somebody down the cliff face and give them what they need, not necessarily just what they want.

Dan: 15:31 I think when we consider people that are in that trough, people who actually do know quite a bit, but feel like they don't, that creates a whole different set of problems for us because their lack of confidence and their misplaced lack of confidence is actually a barrier to our sales. You are totally good enough to buy this baking kit or this bike or this better guitar, but your own mind is telling you that you're not. And so, I think really what the opportunity to do here is, is for brands and ads to use things like bridging language, to help people realize that the skills you have, the capabilities you have, are enough to take the next step. So to be able to do this course, all you need is an understanding of A, B and C. Or to be able to create this piece of art, all you need is the basic skills that are from the fields of X, Y, and Z. So basically dispelling the myths in people's own minds and letting them do a better job of convincing themselves that, "Yes, of course I can do that. It's not as hard as I think it would be." Basically doing the job that a good friend would or a supportive partner would do for somebody. "You've got this."

Mel: 16:35 Yeah. And I mean, I'm thinking about my own work in this space because it's these people that I'm, I guess in a way, more concerned about. These are people who are actually really competent, they actually really do have a lot of knowledge, but it's their confidence that holds them back from maybe sharing that with the world. And I think that's, in a way, a lot sadder than the people who are sitting on top of Mount Stupid.

Dan: 16:55 Yeah. Because the people sitting on top of Mount Stupid are usually screaming pretty loudly.

Mel: 16:59 Yeah. And they might be doing so through their social media platforms. Because-

Dan: 17:04 Oh, shots fired, Dr. Mel.

Mel: 17:06 Well, the thing with social media and an unfortunate sort of drawback of it is that it doesn't necessarily discriminate between those who do know what they're talking about and those who don't. And as we've established is that people themselves can't discriminate that well either. And so, what we find is that social media gives a platform to everybody. The problem is that the people who don't know are more likely to use that platform to express their opinion or their beliefs or their suggestions, when the people who actually do know and perhaps the people that we should be listening to, are going to be second-guessing themselves and hesitating before they click post and share it with the world.

Dan: 17:41 I know. Anybody that knows that the earth is actually round is too busy actually doing something productive with their time to bother posting a rant on social media. So that's why all you get is people saying, "The earth is flat." If you have time to post that the earth is flat, you're probably not smart enough to know the difference. I know we've just lost a hundred percent of our flat earth listeners, but I'm okay. I'm completely fine with that.

Dan: 17:57 So anyway, that's for brands. So, I think if you're dealing with somebody sitting on that peak, then escort them down. If you're dealing with somebody in the trough, then make it easy for them to convince themselves, make it less intimidating, help them bridge what they know definitely to what you want them to do.

Dan: 18:12 What about for peeps, Dr. Mel, what can the poor humble person do to overcome the Dunning-Kruger effect?

Mel: 18:19 So, I guess for regular people, what it comes down to for me is that we're not always the best at evaluating our own competence at different tasks. And we're probably going to make mistakes when we attempt to self-evaluate. So there is value and merit in asking other people for feedback and listening to it. If you think you're really good at something and people suggest that you're not, it would be easy to dismiss it, but maybe it's worth a second thought. On the other hand, if you're doubting yourself and other people actually encourage you and say, "You really are good at it," then maybe they're right. Maybe you are better than you think.

Dan: 18:54 I think in '93, Ice Cube said it best. And I quote, "Check yourself before you wreck yourself."

Mel: 19:02 I think somebody may have said it better than Ice Cube.

Dan: 19:04 Better than Ice Cube? Come on.

Mel: 19:08 Let me give you a quote from Confucius.

Dan: 19:11 Oh, come on.

Mel: 19:12 Real date unknown. Confucius apparently said, "Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance."

Dan: 19:20 Wow. That is deep. Philosophy and ethics in one show. I take my hat off to you, Dr. Mel.

Mel: 19:26 I was going to say, we did say we'd blow people's minds.

Dan: 19:28 Well, okay. Well, consider my mind blown. What an episode.

Mel: 19:32 I think there was a lot in there. Lots of good takeaways.

Dan: 19:33 Yeah. I've also just realized that maybe it was actually nowhere near as good as we thought it was. Anyway, who knows? You can tell us.

Mel: 19:40 Please give us the feedback.

Dan: 19:42 Yeah, yeah. Check ourselves before we wreck ourselves. You can find me at Dan Monheit all over the internet. Where are you, Dr. Mel?

Mel: 19:50 At Dr. Melw in all the places you'd find at Dan Monheit.

Dan: 19:54 Yeah. You'll find Mel just like 30 seconds behind. See you next time.