I'm joined today by David Dunning who is a social psychologist
His research focuses on accuracy and illusion in self-judgement
And you may recognize his last name from the Dunning Kruger Effect
which we have talked about on this program quite a bit.
Now, David, I talk about Dunning Kruger quite a bit,
both on the program and in personal conversations, and I don't want to even take the risk of mis-stating what it is.
So let's start there. What is the Dunning Kruger Effect
meant to designate?
Dunning: Well, the way it's understood in popular culture
is that incompetent people cannot know that they're incompetent.
Actually, you can scratch that. They're not even in a position to know that they're incompetent.
They don't have the skills to recognize
just how many errors and just how many mistakes they're making.
Host: And does this apply to a broad range of activity and endeavors in life?
Or is this really something that when you first explored the phenomenon...
...was designed to stress a very specific type of circumstance?
Dunning: Well, there should be some specificity to it.
That is, we're talking about areas in life where
to produce right answers and correct responses
you'd need to judge whether they're correct or not.
So... a lot of skills in life are like that. Logic is like that.
Problem-solving is like that.
The theories you use to solve problems are often the theories you use
to judge whether or not a problem has been solved.
And, so, the had some specificity to it.
It turns out that there's a broad swath of
intellectual skills, and a broad swath of social skills
that fall into this category.
Host: So increasingly this has become amongst many people I know
something they like to refer to when they hit a roadblock having a political conversation
with someone else... and I'll give you an example. You tell me if this
is an appropriate application
or reference to the Dunning Kruger Effect.
If you're talking to someone who
for example is against abortion
and they're telling you
they really want to reduce the number of abortions
and you explain to them
that the way to do that
as has been empirically demonstrated
is you teach people reasonable
sex education
you provide access to birth control
and the knowledge about how to use it
and you try to prevent pregnancy because
most people who have an abortion
are pregnant.
That's typically the way it goes.
And they can't seem to wrap their mind
around the fact that
they are both against abortion
and they want abstinence only sex education
and they don't want people to have birth control...
Is that an example where they're not recognizing
they're not able to
understand the logic of what
you're telling them? Would this be an
appropriate application?
Dunning: I think that would be an appropriate application.
That is, when people just simply can't get
your logic
for the type of argument that you're making.
Now, mind you, this is an appropriate
application, but remember
it's also the case that the person
on the other side
might also be experiencing an appropriate application
of the Dunning Kruger Effect because
they may very well have
logic that has some soundness to it
that we ourselves are not getting.
So, the one thing I
always like to remind people is that
Dunning Kruger is not only a phenomenon
that happens to other people
it happens with us, each of us, many more times than we might know.
And I'd like people to keep that in mind.
Host: You're work with Dunning Kruger
seems to me
to connect also with your work on
moral character. And some of your research
there has covered...
maybe not surprisingly to many people...
that most people think of themselves
as morally superior
to everybody else, but don't seem to realize that
everybody is a victim of this mentality
and, thus, either everybody is right
or everybody is wrong
in which case the difference between you and the others
in terms of moral character would logically evaporate.
Wouldn't it?
Dunning: I think that's right.
And we've shown that time and again that people do put themselves on a
moral pedestal
That simply can't be. It's unrealistic.
People make judgments of themselves that they just can't attain in reality.
And when we observe them
going through their lives don't obtain
in reality.
And the surprising finding for us
is that when it comes to understanding
the moral nature of people,
we're actually pretty...
we understand...
what's going to influence them
what limitations they're going to succumb to, what strength they're going to have in the moral realm and what weaknesses
they have in the moral realm
And what we tend to do is not apply that wisdom to ourselves
So what we've been able to find is
that people are making an error
in self-psychology... though they tend to
be pretty good social psychologists
when it comes to judging other people.
Host: If we're to agree
at least temporarily or for the purposes of this conversation
that in general we're better off
if we are more accurately able to evaluate
ourselves in relation to
the world around us.
Some people may not agree with that, but let's
assume, at least for this conversation, that we can agree to that.
Dunning: Sure
Host: Are there mechanisms that identify
by which people can talk to themselves, as the case may be, in a way that
allows them to get outside of these
biases you've identified?
Dunning: Well yes, one easy way to do it is just to
talk with other people.
They are already outside these biases.
And sometimes they may be a little
nervous about telling us
what they really think, but
sometimes we can get them to tell us what they really think
and it can be incredibly useful
information that never would have occurred to us.
That's number one.
Another thing that people can do is ask themselves
a question they don't normally ask themselves
and it might be an uncomfortable question but
it might prevent some
discomfort later on...
which is instead of thinking about how I
could be right in any decision or reasoning
I've come to
And ask, "How am I wrong?"
"What's wrong with the decision I've just made?"
And even project
yourself into the future and
imagine my decision turned out drastically wrong... it was a disaster...
"What happened to make it a bad one?"
And thinking that way certainly
gets you outside of the usual box that we're in
but it also clues us in
to any objections or reservations that
maybe we should be entertaining
in the here and now.
Host: The connection I saw as I read a lot
of your work between people's self-assessment of their morality
with the Dunning Kruger Effect
is that it seems with the Dunning Kruger Effect what we haven't practiced, even though
it may not be so explicit,
is people are also assessing
their own competence
to be higher than it is in reality. Is that a fair
correlation to draw?
Dunning: That's a very fair correlation to draw.
Host: And when we go from talking about
one's self-assessment of moral character to issues of competency
and the Dunning Kruger Effect
There it would seem to mean that
it's tougher to circumvent
the limitations because by
your very lack of cognitive ability
you're not realizing
the area in which you lack.
So, is that more difficult to get around?
Dunning: Oh, absolutely. The issue with our moral superiority, or
our feelings of false moral superiority, is a lot of that is
active self-deception. A lot of that is in the business of what we refer to as 'motivated reasoning'.
We're actively trying to hide our imperfections.
Now with the Dunning Kruger Effect, our lack of ability to see our imperfections
are exactly due to our imperfections.
And even though we might be trying hard
to come to an accurate vision of ourselves, and even though we might be very honest and impartial
and thorough in the way that we're judging ourselves, the very fact that
we have imperfect competence
is going to mean that we're going to have
imperfect judgments of ourselves.
So the Dunning Kruger Effect happens
well beyond any self-deception. This is something that goes beyond self-deception.
Host: The last thing I wanted to touch on with regard to Dunning Kruger Effect
is... when we think about intelligence
I think that there's the tendency that people generally have to say, "some people are more intelligent
and some people are less intelligent and it's kind of on a spectrum, but it's an absolute
place on that spectrum that people have."
Is everyone equally susceptible to the Dunning Kruger Effect... at a level that
is adjusted for where on the intelligence spectrum they are?
Or, to say it in another way, if you
have someone who has a much higher IQ
than someone else,
or much better logical reasoning skills that someone else,
are they as equally susceptible to
the Dunning Kruger Effect
but it may just be with other topics
or when talking to different people, than those with less intelligence?
Dunning: Well we don't know
the exact answer to that
but the exact answer I can tell you now
is that sooner or later we're all going to fall
victim to the Dunning Kruger Effect.
That is, no matter how smart you are, you're going to have pockets of
incompetence. You're going to be in new situations you've never been in
or experienced. You're going to
be in areas where you think you know
what you're doing, but you don't know what you're doing.
And, so, I don't think it's a question of being equally susceptible or not equally susceptible to the Dunning Kruger Effect,
what I can say is that the certainty each of us
is going to succumb to it sooner or later... that probability is 1.
The only question is, "where is it going to happen?"
"And how potentially costly is it going to be?"
Host: And if people want to read more
about this, where is the best place where you write about this?
Dunning: I think that the sort of clearing house is
the website for our laboratory at Cornell...
If you Google the term 'Dunning' and the letters SASI, that's "Self And Social Insight," that gets
you to our lab website, and there we have a lot of
links to various things that people have
written about the Dunning Kruger Effect, but also various interviews that I've given
as well.
Host: We've been speaking with social psychologist
David Dunning
Really great having you on. Thank you so much.
Dunning: Thank you, my pleasure.