How you may be tricked by the Dunning-Kruger effect
“Assumption is the mother of all failures”
I’m pretty sure that you have heard this sentence. Today I’m going to show you one of the assumptions, that we have made and still believe in. Being aware of this bias can become handy in your everyday work, especially when you’re dealing with hiring new people to your team.
Do you recognize this chart? Yes, it's known as the Dunning-Kruger effect in IT (and not only :) ). It is not precise, it's only an assumption about a complex topic and I will explain to you why.
What assumption have we made?
From the above chart, we can assume that people who start their careers tend to be cocky and feel Godlike. The sad part is, that many of us think like that. I’ve heard so many times that only juniors can be affected by the Dunning-Kruger effect. You know because seniors always know when they are wrong :). That’s forcing us to think, it is a junior fault.
Ohh, you silly junior
― Is said to the young ambitious person who just doesn’t know what he/she doesn’t know.
I hope I will be able to show you another perspective on the Dunning-Krugger effect.
So, what is the Dunning-Kruger effect?
Let’s dive deep into how the authors of its definition see it. In their work, Mr. Dunning and Mr. Kruger wanted to check if people can recognize their level of skill.
There were few studies, which check different abilities — humor, grammar, and logic.
Regardless of differences in studies, authors gave participants a test and after that, they ask to estimate their test self-performance.
Results were interesting. People who were worst in the test tend to think that they are “above average”. On the other hand, people who were good at recognizing good jokes tend to underestimate their skills.
I know what you think. Sense of humor? Humor is subjective and depends on many, many things. I agree. Just like the authors did. So let’s move on to another study.
Results are kind of similar for bottom Quartile. People think that they are above average. It is named as “above average effect”. We tend to think that our skills are above average. But people who have a higher score, are better in estimating their results. They have another problem, though. The best participants are estimating a little above average. In the paper, we can find out that they overestimated their peers.
It’s called “false consensus effect” — we can just paraphrase that as “If I know that, everyone knows that.”
Experiment 👨🔬💥
Let’s make a little experiment. May you answer my question from 1 to 10 where 1 is “I am the worst”, and 10 is “I am the best”? The question is “How good you are at communication in a team”.
I will give you a moment.
Ok.
Considering the Dunning-Kruger effect most probably we will answer between 6–7. But we know that is not true. Communication is a complex topic and to master that we need to spend a lot of time. Many of us will be worse than we expected.
Why does it happen?
Authors noticed that people over-estimate their skill because their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. On the other hand, people who tend to underestimate their position comparing to other people (Top Quartile) are a victim of “false consensus effect”.
“It suggests that the way to make incompetent individuals realize their own incompetence is to make them competent.”
- Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments
Can seniors be victims too?
Of course. As you may have noticed authors check skills which we use on an everyday basis.
So, seniors can underestimate their skills in topics that they are excellent in, but sometimes they are lacking the knowledge to notice their flaws in another subject.
Mr. Kruger and Mr. Dunning did NOT check the correlation between years of experience and self-awareness.
Dunning-Kruger effect in practice
When we will understand the Dunning-Kruger effect we should think about our hiring process.
Have you ever come across a question during hiring “How good are you at something”? Well, now we know that the answer will not change anything.
Of course, when a question is about something unfamiliar for the respondent, they will answer that they do not know that. For example, a new framework or whole language.
“Finally, in order for the incompetent to overestimate themselves, they must satisfy a minimal threshold of knowledge, theory, or experience that suggests to themselves that they can generate correct answers”
- Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments
How to ask people about their skills?
In my opinion, we should let them solve some problems. Give the candidate a simple task, for example, programming kata. During the solving process, we can recognize the experience or lack of it. Thanks to that, we will be sure that this person knows what they are talking about.
Conclusion
Dunning-Kruger effect is part of our personal and professional lives. It makes us think that we are better or worse than we have expected. We should accept our imperfection but always try to find things that we can do better. Thanks to that we will be more and more aware of our pros and cons.
Also, we should be aware of this effect when we are creating a team or when we try to recruit some new members for our company.
