Socrates said the only true wisdom is knowing when you know nothing but that's
not actually easy for humans to do because our brains want us to think that
we are awesome in 1995 McArthur wheeler walked into a
bank in Pittsburgh ready to rob it. He didn't wear a mask he didn't have like a
fake mustache he was just there robbing a bank in full view of everyone he even
smiled at the security cameras before leaving and going to a second bank to
rob that one - later that night the security footage allowed the police to
pick him up and take him off to jail which shocked him he was shook I wore
the juice he famously exclaimed wheeler believed that rubbing lemon juice on his
skin would render him invisible to videotape cameras this is a cognitive
bias at work and it inspired two psychologists to create some experiments
to understand it better cognitive biases are everywhere have you ever met someone
who has one like perhaps during a group project at school or during an argument
with a stubborn uncle or when you had to toil alongside that co-worker you know
the one I'm talking about somebody who believed they knew things
but really they didn't believing you know something you don't is called the
dunning-kruger effect it's named for the two psychologists who upon hearing about
wheelers bank robberies formulated a set of experiments to determine if wheelers
Joos beliefs were due to some kind of cognitive bias cognitive biases allow us
to convince ourselves that something is true even if the reality is different
cognitive biases protect us from reality they let us process information more
quickly and they help us make decisions more quickly but that doesn't mean that
they are good cognitive biases are essentially a subjective social reality
the dunning-kruger effect is in a nutshell a way for everyone to feel good
an above average internally because most of us are actually completely average
dunning-kruger can help explain why people feel that they're experts even
though they know very little about something a problem sometimes described
by this graph the vertical axis is confidence and the horizontal is
experience imagine someone spent an hour the wikipedia page about global warming
then took to twitter to try in school some climate scientists who have
literally spent their lives studying it you don't have to imagine this because
you know it it happens all the time this cognitive bias is extremely common for
example a 1992 survey of the engineers at one company found that 42% of them
42% believed they were in the top 5% of all the engineers at the company but
that's not actually possible 42 cannot be 5 another example is driving one
study found most people believe that they are above average at driving
but most people cannot be above the average another survey of people aged 77
years and older jived with that as well most assuming they were average or above
average but again that's not actually possible
most people have to be average because that's how statistics work the
psychologists who first realized this bias was part of the human fabric did so
in for studies humor logic and reasoning and English grammar we'll just take one
in the humor study the psychologists asked two groups to rank jokes on a
scale of 1 to 11 1 being not at all funny and 11 being very funny group a
was a set of average Cornell undergraduates in Group B was a small
set of professional comedians the idea was to see if average people would
believe that they were above average at picking out what was funny or as good as
professionals after group a had ranked the jokes the researchers asked them to
compare their ability to pick what was funny against the professional comedians
you know to rate themselves and unsurprisingly on average everyone
overrated their skills remember 50 is average and the whole group together
said that they did 66 which I would rank as an 8 out of 11 on our joke scale but
this is where the surprise comes in those who did the worst placed
themselves in the 58th percentile on average they believed that they were
better than 57 other people out of a hundred their real score the 12th
percentile they were worse than 88 other people these were the victims of this
newly-discovered cognitive bias the idea that people with a little bit of
knowledge or skill in an area believe that they are better than they
are Dunning and Kruger went on to show that this bias exists multiple times
with different experiments like when assessing effective leadership raising
children constructing a solid logical argument and so on
generally in each study the participants in the bottom 25% of scores consistently
ranked themselves in the 70th percentile it is worth pointing out that
self-confidence is extremely important self-esteem is valuable we should all
feel good about ourselves that said we should also have a good assessment of
what we're good at and what we are not good at for example I'm pretty good at
making science videos I am not very good at kung-fu farming or financial policy
it's easy to dismiss Dunning Kruger is just over inflated ego but that's not
actually what's happening even ego can see its own limits and there are some
serious examples of people not even realizing their own failures thanks to
this bias these experiments work not just in humor illogical reasoning and
rules of grammar but also have been replicated in math skills wine-tasting
chess firearm safety among hunters and medical knowledge among surgeons and
that's where things get really serious a 74 year old woman awoke from a simple
spinal fusion surgery in terrible pain because her surgeon believed himself to
be one of the best around instead he's now in prison for life he's accused of
maiming multiple patients and causing two deaths meanwhile he claimed quote
everybody is doing it wrong and that he was quote the best in the whole state
it's pretty amazing that it took us so long to give dunning-kruger a name
because it is everywhere the more we look for it the more we see it that said
dunning-kruger doesn't apply to everything namely in areas where it's
easy to compare baking for example if you assume you're an amazing Baker then
you bake a cake and it's inedible it's pretty hard to deny that you're a
terrible Baker one paper I read said that most people who play golf don't
believe that they are as good as Tiger Woods when surveyed but I would guess if
we asked they would still rate themselves above average because an
online survey of over 1,700 average adults in Great Britain found that one
in eight men believed that they could score a point against Serena Williams
the woman ranked number one in tennis for more than six years that said it's
very important to point out the dunning-kruger effect is gender neutral
it applies to us all interestingly though Dunning Kruger
found the people at the top don't overestimate themselves in fact quite
the opposite dunning-kruger found the best around
tend to rank themselves below their actual performance yeah Nikkei has two
parts people in the bottom 25% ranked themselves at near the top and people in
the top 25 tend to rank themselves a bit lower than their actual score this can
help us understand why it is hard to counter dunning-kruger in order to know
you don't know anything you gotta have to know something an example if your
cognitive bias has you assume that you're amazing at driving
but you only drive it and say rural areas of the desert Southwest how would
you ever find out that you're bad at it you would need to drive around others or
take classes to learn good driving habits or ride with someone who is
objectively considered a good driver to see what you're doing wrong and then get
that critique and recognize it and then learn you think many of those people who
believe they're good drivers are gonna do those things yeah I didn't think so
either in a bit of follow-up research Dunning has found people who are low
performers in reality are not good at accepting criticism and often don't show
interest in self-improvement he told Forbes quote research subjects
were willing to criticize their own previous poor skills once they were
trained up and could see the difference between their previous poor performance
and their new and improved performance but to get them to train up on their own
was very unlikely if we never change the knowledge that we assume we have then we
can just keep on going thinking we're amazing who doesn't want to do that even
if we're not yeh cognitive biases in the end Dunning Kruger is a cognitive bias
that can affect anyone and everyone if you're actually above average at any
task you might be undervaluing yourself and if your average or below average at
some other tasks you're probably assuming you're pretty good in the age
of the internet everyone can be a quote-unquote expert we all have access
to infinite information our minds are drawn to learn a little bit about a lot
of things and that little bit of information is enough to make us weak
minded humans feel confident about what we know even when we know nothing and
add to that two global platforms of social media and then everyone can feel
like an expert and most won't accept any critique let's face it I have probably
been one of those people and maybe you have too
it's crucial in today's overstimulated world to be able to differentiate a real
expert from an overconfident novice and that goes for understanding your value
as well the key is know your talent understand your pitfalls take criticism
and keep on learning way back in 1871 long before we knew what Dunning Kruger
was Charles Darwin wrote ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does
knowledge and it turns out he was right I wonder if Darwin would have rated
himself as being above average on that one thanks so much for watching after
school it was awesome to get to work with mark on this I hope y'all liked it
if you want to watch more science videos check out my channel uno dos of tres I
make a new video every week that scratches that curiosity itch that we
all have here's a recent one on the golden ratio and how it's not quite the
mystical magical thing that was promised