Why Idiots Think They're Smart - Dunning Kruger Effect Explained

12,052 views Wait, is this logic right? • Oct 06, 2023

Slog Reference: The Dunning Kruger effect: Or the overconfidence of idiots

Description

Why smart people think they're stupid, or why idiots are the ones most confident about their beliefs? This observation is explained by a phenomenon called the Dunning-Kruger effect. It explains the overconfidence of idiots and the under confidence of the geniuses. We see many examples of the Dunning Kruger effect in real life. And we're going a little deep with these examples in this episode of FutureIQ.

More videos for you:
Deliberate practice: https://youtu.be/tysT6DMFGH4
The Dip: https://youtu.be/NFqC7mlZlQw
Illusion of explanatory depth: https://youtu.be/_ak0k7GNCjM

Hope you enjoyed FutureIQ by Navin Kabra and Shrikant Joshi. Do hit us up on Twitter:
@ngkabra http://twitter.com/ngkabra
@shrikant https://twitter.com/shrikant

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Watch other episodes of The FutureIQ podcast: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLAppTB0r5_TaYueZ0adD42Wiw5X-wTE4v

Chapters:
00:00 Intro
00:40 Dunning Kruger effect
03:26 Examples
07:00 Reasons
08:18 Stages of competence
10:25 The dip
12:15 Imposter syndrome
13:54 Social media
16:30 Effects on real life
19:26 Politics
20:38 Teams & mindset
23:40 The truth

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The Dunning Kruger effect: Or the overconfidence of idiots

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Transcript

- have you noticed that sometimes the people with the most wrong opinions say them with the most confidence and conversely some of the smartest people the ones who really know their stuff are the ones who are the most hesitant to say anything especially with confidence silence is golden speech is silver well I mean better is WB yet said in Second Coming the best lack all conviction while the worst are full of passionate intensity fools Russian Where Angels Fear To Tread correct so today we are going to talk about the overconfidence of idiots okay so today we are going to talk about a lot of the people I have worked with throughout my life so um it's called the Dunning Krueger effect

0m 47s uh first studied by psychologist Dunning and Kruger and since then it has been replicated in so many different situations so many different areas uh particularly in a lot of offices I have worked yes so let's start with the main example which is there in their original study right what they did was 141 students before uh who took an exam right they asked uh the students how they felt about their own performance right and uh you know compared to the other students where in the class you will be um right and then that is their perceived performance both absolute performance as well as relative grading performance they asked for corre and then compared it against the actual performance and

1m 38s what they found was this graph of Dunning kruer graph which is very very uh you know can we call it the karate graph so basically people who are at the lowest end of the spectrum whose performance was the worst actually had quite a high opinion of themselves right so these are people then the bottom 25% of class thought they were around 60% top listen nobody believes themselves to be in the bottom quar and anyways people don't understand quartiles okay a lot of people don't really understand what quartiles mean that's irrelevant okay the point is that people who are at the bottom of the class thought they were above the average they were above the middle 35 students basically thought

2m 23s they were better than 70 students yeah something like that right in general um if you look all the students H all of them thought they were above average or at least most of them thought they were above average okay the other interesting thing is that people at the right at the top end thought they were actually a little worse than what they actually were right so those are the two interesting findings the bottom thinks they're above average and the top thinks they below the top below no below the top they don't think of themselves as below average okay but a little below L everybody thinks of themselves as above average yeah I am above average so this

3m 02s thing has been replicated not just in exams but in a whole number of different uh areas and once we talk about it today once we talk about the various examples you will start seeing it and how it impacts your life I'm sorry for this quick uh off topic digression but uh the worst place this actually appears in is something called the bell curve rating in up appraisals that happen in certain big companies look it up bell curve appraisals I hate it I hate it with a passion so I mean you know office is the obvious example the most confident people in the office are not necessarily the most competent right anybody who has worked in an office agrees with this

3m 50s statement but also stock market right if you talk to people about the stock market the ones who are most confidently going on and up about what this stock is going to do and what that stock is going to do are probably the ones who most likely lose money in the stock market right you just you just ruined a lot of uh YouTubers [Music] livelihoods so another example probably in this office and probably me in the future anyway so another example right uh my friend uh doc bushan who's a psychiatrist I'm just going to read out a tweet of his right where he's saying that huge clinical confidence is often a sign of inadequate education experience and honest

4m 39s introspection basically he's saying that the more confident a doctor is the more likely that the doctor is a bad doctor right direct Dunning Krueger effect right but I mean these are just you know anecdotes Impressions but let's talk about actual studies right there is an actual study listen I'm willing to I'm willing to accept all of these anecdotes as absolute uh that guy there is not convinced so I'm going trust me that guy is also convinced because that guy also definitely experienc this but sure go ahead give us data so managers who think that their managerial skills are above average are usually the worst managers right no I'm not talking I actually should go out of this episode and let

5m 24s nain speak because I will just be laughing throughout this episode one more a recent study talks about what they discovered the [ __ ] blind spot okay and basically what they found was that the people who think they are extremely good at spotting [ __ ] are the ones who are worst at spotting [ __ ] and are easily taken in by [ __ ] okay so this is giving me flashbacks of so many kinds no so instead of what happens let's talk about why it happens let's try to understand that right think about the impact this has right I mean think about the poor people who have such high opinions of themselves so they I I never

6m 03s have been able to understand how they cannot realize that their opinions are inflated well that is how do you lack that amount of self- awareness well the reason they think they are good is because they don't have self-awareness right that's called the Dual burden which is that they actually don't have the skill that is disadvantage one and that they don't have the skill or they don't have the ability to to judge quality of their skill and that is the second disadvantage they have right and if you think you don't have this disadvantage remember the time you watching a cricket match and said square cut would have been a better option you don't you lack the awareness that you

6m 45s don't have the skill the point is ignorance is everywhere yeah and ignorance is invisible to the people who suffer from it right so it's an unknown unknown yeah ignorance is bliss and everybody likes to live in Bliss the reason this happens is that you know one is called the better than average effect which is that pretty much everybody thinks they are better than average so obviously the person at the bottom is going to have a very inflated sense of their own capability I would like to rephrase that a little bit I know the statement is everybody likes to think they're better than average the truth is nobody wants to be worse than average that's why they assume themselves to be

7m 25s better than average correct and it's a system one thing right uh so system one does not want to admit that you are below average so it makes up reasons and system 2 makes up reasons to convince yourself that you are above average red con go check out the episode on System One versus system 2 and you know a simpler reason could also be that you know in general there are lots of low performers and very few High performers and so obviously there's going to be within the low performers there are some who have a reasonably accurate idea of Their Own abilities where are there are some who don't and that's why you get some people who show up as uh you know

8m 06s much higher uh perception of their own abilities whereas the people at the top don't they're much fewer um but what I really like is to think about in terms of the four stages of competence okay okay um this something we have talked about in our uh episode on the dip also right okay uh and deliberate practice so when you start out okay you are incompetent and you don't know you are incompetent right unconscious incompetance so you are bad and you don't know you are bad because you know nothing um about anything right the first time I tried to kick a football very confidently thinking I will hit it straight to the person in front of me so

8m 49s that is you being at the top of the Dunning Krueger effect right then as you start digging into that skill try to start learning then suddenly you realize oh I don't know anything right that is conscious incompetence so now your uh own perception of your abilities goes down sharply and now it is sort of aligned with what the reality the reality right yeah this is where I spend most of my time in life if you continious incompetence practicing deliberate practice right then what will happen is conscious competence right you get better at it and you know you are getting better at getting better at it right there's an entire episode on delate practice that you should

9m 35s definitely check out now again your perception is aligned with reality but you're up above average right correct then after a while what happens is unconscious competence which is you are very good but you have been doing it for so long that you have forgotten the struggle you have forgotten how bad you were you have forgotten how long it took you to get here and you have forgotten that you are good right you just do it without realizing it and you don't even think it's a big deal right and people who are like 5 years behind you they're like oh my God he did that and you don't even realize it right that's why the most competent people appear as if they

10m 14s have uh lower perception of their own abilities that is unconscious competence right yeah so this concept Dunning Krueger effect is related to a lot of things we talk about right and in fact so I want to go through some of the episodes that are uh we have done in the past and that are related yeah so when we talked about the dip how anything important you want to do initially you make a lot of progress and then there is a dip correct it's very related to the Dunning Krueger effect initially you don't know how bad you are and so you make progress very fast and then after a while you realize oh this I don't know

10m 51s so much and that's when you hit the dip and only when you get to the conscious competence and unconscious competence stage uh that's when uh you start making the real uh returns from all that investment right correct uh similarly uh it's a very funny and very fascinating way to look at it oh I'm incompetent so I'm learning really fast then I realize that I'm truly incompetent deep yeah the other thing we talk about is how the real way for you to improve and become an expert is through deliberate practice okay and deliberate practice one very important thing we pointed was that you need to have a coach correct or some external person who tells you what you're doing wrong so

11m 37s what you need to improve yes and that is directly tied to Dunning Krueger effect if you try to do it yourself you have no idea what you are bad at you think you are very good correct right someone else has to tell you that improve this improve this improve this there needs to be a feedback mechanism correct that is clear right and honest and sort of uh related to that uh opposite of Dunning Krueger effect except if the feedback is only clear and only honest all the time without any help to you then that's not feedback yeah you know what I mean yes so the opposite of Dunning Krueger effect is the Imposter syndrome uh right

12m 19s which is that people who are good A lot of people who are good they really think they are not that good right and um I mean you see some connection to the top end of the Dunning Kruger effect but the other way to think about it is this that if you don't have imposters in room then you should worry that you probably are you have Dunning Krueger right so what if I what if now I'm 100% sure that I don't have D Kroger what did that tell you yes so another episode we did was something we called the overconfidence and illusion of explanatory depth right where people think they know a whole bunch of things

13m 02s but when you make them actually do something or get into the details that's when they realized oh I didn't know this correct and again that you can see fun episode that a really fun you can see the relationship with Dunning Krueger effect right because you haven't gotten into the details you have an inflated opinion of your ability to understand things right so and of course forget episodes right I think one of the most important areas where Dunning Kruger effect has a big impact on your life is social media right before before he goes on to talk about social media if we have we have already shot these episodes uh if they are ready and available for you

13m 43s you'll find links to them in the show notes if not just run a search on the channel and you'll find them or just just go through all of the episodes you'll enjoy them for short so one thing for social example is that the people most conf confidently posting on social media are probably the ones suffering from Dunning Krueger and are the ones who know the least right the ones they are the ones who shouldn't be posting right so in general the takeaway message one takeaway message is that you know stop enrolling in the WhatsApp University right everything there has to be taken with a heavy dose of a truckload of salt a truckload of Dunning

14m 26s Krueger truckload of the converse of this is I am not on WhatsApp I'm not on social media I am I rarely post my thoughts anywhere yeah so that's the converse of Dunning Krueger right which is that good people are not sharing on social media why a I am impressed he called me good and I'm very pleased he called me good and but the most common thing I hear from some of the smartest people I know not necessarily you but you know there are others B he has to bring me back down to Mother Earth is oh I have nothing interesting to share I don't have anything interesting to share exactly the people who don't have anything

15m 06s interesting to share are the ones convinced that they have interesting things to share whereas the ones who do don't right and the the message I have for people like this look everything interesting that I have to share I come and share here what else can I share the message I have is that you know we need the good people to share to undo the effects of all the others right uh but do not think of yourself as an expert sharing expertise with the world okay expt yeah and no no expert thinks of themselves as really an expert right the correct way to think about it the reason I am doing this channel is I think of

15m 47s myself as a 10-year-old explaining to 5year olds right that I am not an expert but I know a little more than you okay you are where I was 3 years ago five years ago so here is my explanation that actually that's actually smart I told you he's smart I mean I know people who think oh my God that's not the right way to do things and you shouldn't be giving opinions unless you're an expert but I think you know if you do that then you leave the field open for the idiots let's not do that right so yeah I should have I should have basically done this 5 years ago but no matter 5 years latest

16m 28s not too late right so five years later what is the message what is the message messages are one remember that Dunning Krueger effect is widespread it is serious and it can cause a lot of problems like it can lead you into the wrong kind of career right the number of students wasting time on je studies when they're clearly not fit for engineering in general they should be doing something else that they are actually good at yeah right um the number of people trying to do a startup when they have no business doing a startup or even a business right uh is really large is a lot of people doing startups and businesses are basically uh they don't

17m 15s know how bad they are they don't know how bad they might know how bad they are but they might not have an option I listen depend on the details okay completely different thing to keep in mind is that Dunning Krueger effect has serious implications on the opinions you form and you hold okay I'm going to read a tweet by GS bogal right he says that you know warning many people don't have an opinion on something until somebody asked them about it and then at that point in that instant they decide oh well I need to have an opinion on this right so they Cobble together a Viewpoint from whim and half remembered he say and this and that and and then

17m 59s once they have formed an opinion and said it out aloud now they're stuck to that opinion they will decide that this two-minute old opinion makeshift opinion that they have is the new Hill they will die on and they will hold on to that for the rest of their life and in fact not just people I mean you can think of people who do this you can you know examples right yeah all of us know examples there is recent paper showing that even AI even chat GPT does this right if you ask chat GPT for its opinion on something and then later on give it data it will refuse to take your data okay it will stick to its opinion

18m 40s so this is important do not form opinions listen anybody asks me something I don't know my first answer is I don't know yeah you are not in normal people okay that we have established so let's this channel is for normal people you know there is research huh showing that a large number of people if you ask them oh how well do you know so and so topic and they will say well some what I know it or very well and all of that often of topics that don't exist researchers completely made up words and ask how well do you know it and people said yeah yeah I know this somewhat right so uh there are

19m 20s people wow right research there's a link take a look at the link but also that's bad this has implications for policy of course it has implications for policy people go around so easy for politicians to get you worked up on things you know nothing about by just asking you for an opinion about that and you make an opinion about that and now for the next five years you're going to fight over that without having the data right yeah but part of the reason is because you know there are some people you uh assign trust to I'm not saying you trust them but you assign trust to like for example you you would assume that a politician

19m 59s that you voted for knows about that particular kind of stuff so if they saying it's like the most idiotic thing I've ever heard no trusting politicians hello listen I'm not saying trusting politician that's why I'm saying I'm assigning trust to them like I be okay let's not say politicians let's say journalists so some journalist you assign trust to and you say okay whatever this journalist says I will believe because I don't have the time to research what they say I will trust that they have done the research they have done the study and whatnot so you just accept what they say face value yeah but then you have to choose the right journalist for that and the number is

20m 33s very low the ones who can be trusted like that in fact that is one of the difficult skills that we have to master in the modern world knowing whom to trust right a completely different angle on this whole problem is what I'll I mean it is again a standard term that people are researching it's called male huis and female humility okay in fact the Dunning of Dunning Kruger teamed up with another student earlinger and they did a study which found that when you separate people out by gender right uh they asked 10 questions to men and women and then uh asked them how many do you think you got right on overestimated themselves 100% women underestimated

21m 23s right so I wasn't overestimating men I was correctly estimating men so yeah so I mean you know this sort of affects women more in some sense of course and all of this has an effect on your teams yeah right so um if you are in a company you're in charge of a team people around you what should you do what is the right thing to do right it is important that there should be honest feedback right you have a high opinion of yourself and if everybody around you just to be kind doesn't say what they honestly think then you will never know you'll never get out of the Dunning Krueger hole right Elon are you listening related

22m 04s concept is growth mindset um look up the episode uh for that but basic idea is that when somebody criticizes you there are two kinds of people the ones who get all worked up oh my God how how dare you criticize me or more than that this is like okay I am deficient and the other category will say oh well okay good I have an area for improvement right so the second category are the people who are going to do well of course um so in teams there should be growth mindset combined with honest feedback but also all of that needs to be combined with psychological safety right people should be willing to admit their shortcomings

22m 47s admit their failures and to take uh negative feedback right and generally value a variety of skills different people are good at different things right so overall I think one message there is what tukaram said in that's a saint in the local culture of Maharashtra uh he was a marati saint and he said uh always have a Critic live next to you correct and I mean you know he knew about D Kruger effect obviously I wish I could uh I I could cram this episode into the brains of every person I have met in life and everybody in the world because uh these are important things for everybody to remember yes so should we do the part

23m 36s where we say all this wasn't really true please so couple of things to keep in mind right we are D kering the Dunning kruer correct episode so one is that a lot of uh people I mean say Dunning Krueger a little wrong right I mean we have also sort of said it as in we've done a bit B of hand waving in the episode but that is necessary to get the point across I mean you know when you say that the biggest problem with stupid people is that they're too stupid to realize they stupid right we hav that we haven't said that haven't said that but basically it's important to remember that Dunning Krueger isn't about general

24m 16s intelligence okay it is about specific skills oh yeah okay so in a particular area for that particular skill you might be bad in that skill and not know how bad you are right like I I I probably have D Kruger about football and Cricket correct which means that experts in one area can be dumr in another area right and intelligent people can still have their blind spots like this absolutely absolutely the other thing I can't go and decide what works in World politics I have absolutely no knowledge of world politics sometimes Danny Krueger is a good thing right having an optimism bias is necessary to survive in the world sometime right some startups some of the

25m 02s best startups the ones that changed the world wouldn't have existed if the founders really know how difficult it was and you know they were not really ready for uh how much effort it was going to be all of the startups that have changed the world so far they started off with very simple ideas and then grew into beh yeah I mean you know to mangle the JFK phrase we do these things not because they are easy but because thought they would be easy yeah he mangled it we do these things not because they are easy but because they are hard uh the thing is that in the planning stages it is good to have good

25m 44s understanding of you know the problems you can run into so that you can plan for them and you can have a backup plan and in the plan St it's good to have imposter syndrome but then in the execution phase having Dunning Kruger is good because you know uh if you don't know how bad it is you keep going and maybe you succeed right so see that's that's the thing the planning stages I have massive imposter syndrome all the time every time and they never get to that stage right need a little more than in kruer I mean a different way of saying it is that when a general is planning a campaign you don't want him

26m 20s to have overconfidence overconfidence but then on the day of the battle some overconfidence is actually good that overconfidence is what gives you courage except I've never reached that part where I get the overconfidence so I'm not really um supposed to speak on it but he is because he's the expert and he knows stuff I am just so now whatever now do you think you understand the Kruger effect not really yes correct answer listen Dunning Krueger is confusing all I know is that I know nothing socus I know I know nothing yes that's the best way to start SRI this is the best point to end Sant na future IQ where we teach you that you know nothing

27m 07s yes thank you for watching till the end if you like this episode check out these others you might like them also and please share with your friends I'm sure they will also like these thank you