Do you know the syndrome of overconfidence in his skills? Nicknamed the “Dunning-Kruger effect”, this cognitive bias concerns unskilled people who overestimate their real abilities. At work as elsewhere.
Why do low-skilled people overestimate themselves so often? The explanation of this cognitive bias was theorized in 1999 by two American psychologists, David Dunning and Justin Kruger, under the name of “Dunning-Kruger effect”, following an incredible case study *. This explains why we meet so often in our professional environment (and even outside) people who consider themselves particularly competent, even though they do not master their subject at all. This is also called ultracrepidarianism.
This phenomenon of overconfidence is found of course at work but also elsewhere, like these self-proclaimed experts in Covid vaccines on social networks without any real scientific skills or these football professionals. at the local bar, who have never touched a ball. To summarize the Dunning-Kruger effect, “The less a person knows about an area, the more likely they are to overestimate themselves in that same area.” This cognitive bias may seem paradoxical at first, but it’s explained quite simply: if you know little about a subject, you have no way of knowing how up-to-date your skills are or not. It’s a bit the opposite of the impostor syndrome.
Dunning-Kruger effect: incompetence in business
The first area where the Dunning-Kruger effect applies is the workplace. Who has never had to deal with a manager or an employee who is totally incompetent but absolutely convinced of the contrary ?! As can be read in the theory of the two professors of psychology at Cornell University, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, this phenomenon, very frequent, has a direct impact on the relations between collaborators (source of tension) and the overall productivity of the company (because of this incompetence and this overconfidence).
The difficulty with this cognitive bias is that people who suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect do not voluntarily lie about their talents and abilities, but are truly unable to recognize their shortcomings, limitations, and mistakes. All this, for lack of knowledge, and it does not necessarily have to do with their studies, a lack of education or experience. The art of management is to learn to manage these profiles with psychology (and to avoid it as much as possible). And it can also sometimes not really be a Dunning-Kruger problem but just bad management, which leaves employees in the dark.
According to this principle, this can give rise to various problems in business:
- Recruitment of people who are very sure of themselves but in reality incompetent
- Promotion or increase of employees who do not have the required qualities (and negative impact on the people who could claim this title or this salary reassessment)
- Appearance of tensions within a team where skills are very polarized between employees
- General negative impact on the quality of the work carried out and delivered as well as the achievement of objectives
- External negative impact on relationships with customers and service providers
Read also : Get Rid of Impostor Syndrome? It’s possible !
“Ignorance breeds self-confidence more frequently than knowledge does”
Darwin
The Dunning Kruger effect in everyday life
On social networks, we tend to see the Dunning-Kruger effect everywhere. But is this the reality? It is true that pseudo experts are flocking, whether on Twitter or Facebook. Since the start of the pandemic, we have seen experts in chloroquine, vaccination and immunology flourish. There are also those who think they have understood everything about Bitcoin or who know better than everyone what strategy the French Football Team should have adopted during Euro 2021.
It can just as easily be a colleague, a person in your family, a friend or an influencer, a blogger …
The path – between ignorance and expertise – is generally as follows:
- Discovery of a previously unknown subject
- Accumulation of varied knowledge (not always reliable)
- Feeling in control of the subject in question
- Arrival at the top of the “Mountain of stupidity”
- Acquisition of new knowledge
- Arrival in the “Valley of humility” (we realize that we do not know the subject)
- Passage through the slope of illumination
- Arrival at the consolidation platform (real level of expertise)
As can be seen, a person at the top of the “mountain of stupidity” will be difficult to reason. You have to have patience, try to steer her and hope that her path will allow her to descend into the valley of despair (or valley of stupidity) before she is really formed on the subject (or at least has l sufficient humility to accurately estimate their level of competence). As a Persian proverb points out, “Doubt is the key to all knowledge.”
How to remedy the Dunning-Kruger effect?
In order to see more clearly, the two American psychologists established four different degrees of their hypothesis during their study:
- The incompetent person tends to overestimate their skill level
- The incompetent person fails to recognize the competence of those who truly possess it
- The incompetent person fails to realize his degree of incompetence
- If training these people leads to a significant improvement in their competence, then they will be able to recognize and accept their previous shortcomings.
For managers, the first thing to do is to learn to distinguish between self-confidence and competence. But we must also learn to manage the phenomenon and prevent its negative impacts on both employees and productivity. From this perspective, soft skills will be particularly important. Very trendy in recent years, especially in terms of professional training, these “soft skills” are relational intelligence, communication skills, character and interpersonal skills. There is an innate part in this, but it is also possible to take training courses to improve your soft skills and better know how to react in the event of conflict or of a person visibly out of place in their position. In the face of ignorance, one must show psychology.
Is it necessary for all that to oppose incompetents and experts? No, that is not the question. The main challenge is more to upgrade the skills of people who suffer from the Dunning-Kruger effect, in order to reach level 4 of the two teachers theory. According to David Dunning, the number one reason some non-skilled people underperform in business is that they just don’t know that it is possible to do better. They also do not know how to recognize good results from poor results. We have to teach them all that.
Read also : 3 tips to stop apologizing at work
* The case study that theorized the Dunning Kruger effect
In 1995 in Pittsburg (United States), a man – McArthur Wheeler – decides to rob two banks with armed hands but with his face hidden. To do this, he covers his face with lemon juice, assuming that, if lemon juice can serve as invisible ink, it can just as easily hide a face … (no comment).
Watching the security camera tapes, the police quickly made the connection and the man was soon apprehended. It was by trying to understand the reason for the thief’s insurance during his burglaries in the middle of the day that the theory linked to this cognitive bias was conceptualized. Dunning and Kruger then did a full-scale test to confirm their theory. They questioned their students in two areas: logic and grammar.
They then asked them to estimate their results and the position they imagined they had in their group (in short, did they consider themselves competent or incompetent). By comparing their results (evaluated by teachers) and their vision of their performance, they were able to theorize their hypothesis. Indeed, the students who overvalued themselves the most were the ones who … did not fare well.
Florence santrot
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