Explanation for Hines
V-Man
By ERICA GOODE
There are many incompetent people in the world. Dr. David A. Dunning is
haunted by the fear he might be one of them.
Dr. Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell, worries about this
because, according to his research, most incompetent people do not know
that they are incompetent.
On the contrary. People who do things badly, Dr. Dunning has found in
studies conducted with a graduate student, Justin Kruger, are usually
supremely confident of their abilities -- more confident, in fact, than
people who do things well.
"I began to think that there were probably lots of things that I was bad
at and I didn't know it," Dr. Dunning said.
One reason that the ignorant also tend to be the blissfully
self-assured, the researchers believe, is that the skills required for
competence often are the same skills necessary to recognize competence.
The incompetent, therefore, suffer doubly, they suggested in a paper
appearing in the December issue of the Journal of Personality and Social
Psychology.
"Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate
choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it,"
wrote Dr. Kruger, now an assistant professor at the University of
Illinois, and Dr. Dunning.
This deficiency in "self-monitoring skills," the researchers said, helps
explain the tendency of the humor-impaired to persist in telling jokes
that are not funny, of day traders to repeatedly jump into the market --
and repeatedly lose out -- and of the politically clueless to continue
holding forth at dinner parties on the fine points of campaign strategy.
Some college students, Dr. Dunning said, evince a similar blindness:
after doing badly on a test, they spend hours in his office, explaining
why the answers he suggests for the test questions are wrong.
In a series of studies, Dr. Kruger and Dr. Dunning tested their theory
of incompetence. They found that subjects who scored in the lowest
quartile on tests of logic, English grammar and humor were also the most
likely to "grossly overestimate" how well they had performed.
In all three tests, subjects' ratings of their ability were positively
linked to their actual scores. But the lowest-ranked participants showed
much greater distortions in their self-estimates. Asked to evaluate
their performance on the test of logical reasoning, for example,
subjects who scored only in the 12th percentile guessed that they had
scored in the 62nd percentile, and deemed their overall skill at logical
reasoning to be at the 68th percentile.
Similarly, subjects who scored at the 10th percentile on the grammar
test ranked themselves at the 67th percentile in the ability to
"identify grammatically correct standard English," and estimated their
test scores to be at the 61st percentile.
On the humor test, in which participants were asked to rate jokes
according to their funniness (subjects' ratings were matched against
those of an "expert" panel of professional comedians), low-scoring
subjects were also more apt to have an inflated perception of their
skill. But because humor is idiosyncratically defined, the researchers
said, the results were less conclusive.
Unlike their unskilled counterparts, the most able subjects in the
study, Dr. Kruger and Dr. Dunning found, were likely to underestimate
their own competence. The researchers attributed this to the fact that,
in the absence of information about how others were doing, highly
competent subjects assumed that others were performing as well as they
were -- a phenomenon psychologists term the "false consensus effect."
When high scoring subjects were asked to "grade" the grammar tests of
their peers, however, they quickly revised their evaluations of their
own performance. In contrast, the self-assessments of those who scored
badly themselves were unaffected by the experience of grading others;
some subjects even further inflated their estimates of their own
abilities.
"Incompetent individuals were less able to recognize competence in
others," the researchers concluded.
In a final experiment, Dr. Dunning and Dr. Kruger set out to discover if
training would help modify the exaggerated self-perceptions of incapable
subjects. In fact, a short training session in logical reasoning did
improve the ability of low-scoring subjects to assess their performance
realistically, they found.
The findings, the psychologists said, support Thomas Jefferson's
assertion that "he who knows best knows how little he knows."
And the research meshes neatly with other work indicating that
overconfidence is a common; studies have found, for example, that the
vast majority of people rate themselves as "above average" on a wide
array of abilities -- though such an abundance of talent would be
impossible in statistical terms. And this overestimation, studies
indicate, is more likely for tasks that are difficult than for those
that are easy.
Such studies are not without critics. Dr. David C. Funder, a psychology
professor at the University of California at Riverside, for example,
said he suspected that most lay people had only a vague idea of the
meaning of "average" in statistical terms.
"I'm not sure the average person thinks of 'average' or 'percentile' in
quite that literal a sense," Dr. Funder said, "so 'above average' might
mean to them 'pretty good,' or 'O.K.,' or 'doing all right.' And if, in
fact, people mean something subjective when they use the word, then it's
really hard to evaluate whether they're right or wrong using the
statistical criterion."
But Dr. Dunning said his current research and past studies indicated
that there were many reasons why people would tend to overestimate their
competency, and not be aware of it.
In some cases, Dr. Dunning pointed out, an awareness of one's own
inability is inevitable: "In a golf game, when your ball is heading into
the woods, you know you're incompetent," he said.
But in other situations, feedback is absent, or at least more ambiguous;
even a humorless joke, for example, is likely to be met with polite
laughter. And faced with incompetence, social norms prevent most people
from blurting out "You stink!" -- truthful though this assessment may
be.
All of which inspired in Dr. Dunning and his co-author, in presenting
their research to the public, a certain degree of nervousness.
"This article may contain faulty logic, methodological errors or poor
communication," they cautioned in their journal report. "Let us assure
our readers that to the extent this article is imperfect, it is not a
sin we have committed knowingly."
V-Man A Knight is sworn to Valor
=/\= His Heart knows only Virtue
(-o-) His Blade defends the Weak
<*> His Word speaks only Truth
His Wrath undoes the Wicked