|
THE IGNORANCE OF ARROGANCE
One of my favorite accolades is a satirical award for research that’s as
entertaining as it is enlightening. It’s called the Ig™ Nobel Prize, and it’s
handed out by actual Nobel laureates. One autumn in college, I raced to the
campus theater to watch the ceremony along with over a thousand fellow
nerds. The winners included a pair of physicists who created a magnetic
field to levitate a live frog, a trio of chemists who discovered that the
biochemistry of romantic love has something in common with obsessive-
compulsive disorder, and a computer scientist who invented PawSense—
software that detects cat paws on a keyboard and makes an annoying noise
to deter them. Unclear whether it also worked with dogs.
Several of the awards made me laugh, but the honorees who made me
think the most were two psychologists, David Dunning and Justin Kruger.
They had just published a “modest report” on skill and confidence that
would soon become famous. They found that in many situations, those who
can’t . . . don’t know they can’t. According to what’s now known as the
Dunning-Kruger effect, it’s when we lack competence that we’re most
likely to be brimming with overconfidence.
In the original Dunning-Kruger studies, people who scored the lowest
on tests of logical reasoning, grammar, and sense of humor had the most
inflated opinions of their skills. On average, they believed they did better
than 62 percent of their peers, but in reality outperformed only 12 percent
of them. The less intelligent we are in a particular domain, the more we
seem to overestimate our actual intelligence in that domain. In a group of
football fans, the one who knows the least is the most likely to be the
armchair quarterback, prosecuting the coach for calling the wrong play and
preaching about a better playbook.
This tendency matters because it compromises self-awareness, and it
trips us up across all kinds of settings. Look what happened when
economists evaluated the operations and management practices of
thousands of companies across a wide range of industries and countries, and
compared their assessments with managers’ self-ratings:
Sources: World Management Survey; Bloom and Van Reenen 2007; and Maloney 2017b.
In this graph, if self-assessments of performance matched actual
performance, every country would be on the dotted line. Overconfidence
existed in every culture, and it was most rampant where management was
the poorest.
*
Of course, management skills can be hard to judge objectively.
Knowledge should be easier—you were tested on yours throughout school.
Compared to most people, how much do you think you know about each of
the following topics—more, less, or the same?
Why English became the official language of the United States
Why women were burned at the stake in Salem
What job Walt Disney had before he drew Mickey Mouse
On which spaceflight humans first laid eyes on the Great Wall of
China
Why eating candy affects how kids behave
One of my biggest pet peeves is feigned knowledge, where people
pretend to know things they don’t. It bothers me so much that at this very
moment I’m writing an entire book about it. In a series of studies, people
rated whether they knew more or less than most people about a range of
topics like these, and then took a quiz to test their actual knowledge. The
more superior participants thought their knowledge was, the more they
overestimated themselves—and the less interested they were in learning and
updating. If you think you know more about history or science than most
people, chances are you know less than you think. As Dunning quips, “The
first rule of the Dunning-Kruger club is you don’t know you’re a member of
the Dunning-Kruger club.”
*
On the questions above, if you felt you knew anything at all, think
again. America has no official language, suspected witches were hanged in
Salem but not burned, Walt Disney didn’t draw Mickey Mouse (it was the
work of an animator named Ub Iwerks), you can’t actually see the Great
Wall of China from space, and the average effect of sugar on children’s
behavior is zero.
Although the Dunning-Kruger effect is often amusing in everyday life,
it was no laughing matter in Iceland. Despite serving as governor of the
central bank, Davíð Oddsson had no training in finance or economics.
Before entering politics, he had created a radio comedy show, written plays
and short stories, gone to law school, and worked as a journalist. During his
reign as Iceland’s prime minister, Oddsson was so dismissive of experts that
he disbanded the National Economic Institute. To force him out of his post
at the central bank, Parliament had to pass an unconventional law: any
governor would have to have at least a master’s degree in economics. That
didn’t stop Oddsson from running for president a few years later. He
seemed utterly blind to his blindness: he didn’t know what he didn’t know.
Do'stlaringiz bilan baham: |
