Mind Readings: Preventing Dunning Kruger Effect

In this episode, let's talk about reducing a specific kind of cognitive bias. The cognitive bias known as the Dunning Kruger effect. The Dunning Kruger effect is a cognitive bias. It's a thing that we believe that is incorrect, whereby people who have relatively low ability or expertise or experience with a particular domain of knowledge tend to overestimate or dramatically overestimate their knowledge or ability. We see this made fun of a lot in business and management.

People being referred to as pointy-haired bosses and saying things like, well, if I don't understand something, it must be easy. Or people having just unfounded confidence in in doing something. They look at uh a task and they say, Oh, that must be easy. I can do that. And obviously, this can go very badly, right?

If um if you have somebody who fails to recognize their own incompetence, if they're a bad manager but they think they're a great manager, right? That that can go really badly for everybody. If there's somebody who thinks they're amazing at web analytics and they're not, uh if they uh believe they're good at SEO and yet they can't get anything to rank for anything, if they believe that they are empathetic or they are uh uh well loved and they're not, those are all examples of Dunning Kruger effect. Counteracting it is very, very difficult. Um like any kind of cognitive bias.

The only way to counteract it in somebody else, well, there is no other way to counteract somebody else, um, but a person has to want to counteract it themselves. And that requires a certain degree of self-awareness that not a lot of people have, myself included. The thing that I try to do to uh reduce it as much as I can with specificity, right? If I look at a task or domain of knowledge, and my first instinct is that unfounded confidence, I can do that. I ask myself, well, how would I do that?

Right? Something like uh a part of my vacuum cleaner breaks. I can figure that out. How? Well, first I'll take it apart and I guess figure out and see what's wrong.

Um I think that's a pretty clear indicator that I don't have the specific knowledge I need to actually make that change. And it's a sign that Dun and Kruger effect is occurring in me. On the other hand, if I see my email open rates are down 5%, again, I get the feeling, oh, I can fix that, but now I have a list. Okay, I'm first gonna check the deliverability numbers, gonna check Google Postmaster tools, I'm gonna check my DMARC reports, I'm gonna see if I've been blacklisted anywhere, gonna check the the dynamic blacklists, all these things. I'm going to uh check through uh the the headers with you know the return headers within my inbox.

There's all these different steps that I know to take to see when open rates are down, to figure out why. In this case, I know that that level of confidence is not baseless. There is there is good reason for me to have that level of confidence because I have that level of specifics to say, here's how I know how to solve this problem. Now, is there room for improvement? Of course, there's always room for improvement.

But at the very least, I can feel somewhat assured that I have specific knowledge to diagnose that problem, specific knowledge that yields that confidence that says, yeah, I this is a problem that I can solve. And that's sort of how I, to the best of my ability, rein in that sense of overconfidence. So if you're somebody who is concerned that Dun and Kruger effect might apply to you, that you might be overconfident in certain areas, you would want to uh use this specificity test. Can you see in your mind, uh, or however it is that you think the specific things you need to do to accomplish the task? How much gray area is there, right?

If somebody is laying on the ground, apparently having some kind of medical issue. Do you have the knowledge to do a rapid diagnosis, right? Uh I have very basic knowledge, airway, breathing, circulation, the conditions for deciding whether to start CPR or not. Beyond that, I know that I lack specific knowledge. I I don't know anything about neuroscience, right?

I don't know anything about uh countering anaphylactic shock other than if they have an epic pen, stick in the middle of their leg. Um but knowing the boundaries of your knowledge, testing the boundaries of your knowledge by asking yourself, how specifically do I know how to solve this problem is how you rein in the Dun and Kruger effect to reduce the likelihood that you're going to be overconfident. And overconfidence can literally be deadly, right? If you have spent, you know, 50 hours playing Microsoft Flight Simulator, you might think that you're capable of landing an actual plane. Are you actually capable of landing an actual plane?

I don't know. But this would be a good test to say, okay, what are the things that I would need to know how to do to land a plane? I if you were uh asked to land a plane and you've got you know 500 hours or 5,000 hours in a simulator, and you can recite the exact checklist, you know, what uh number to put the flaps at, what your airspeed should be at, what your angle of attack on your nose should be, all those things would indicate that yeah, okay, you're probably ready to go ahead and land that plane if you need to. So that would be my suggestion, and it's something that you can certainly discuss with others. Uh probably not in a situation where you're accusing someone else of uh being under Duncruger effect because people can be very defensive, but as a way of explaining it to it outside of a that context and and introducing that specificity test uh to people so that they can check themselves if they if they are so inclined.

So that's what's uh that's what's on my mind today. Thanks for tuning in. If you like this video, go ahead and hit that subscribe button.