Because I often think that the good life or success or a pleasurable existence often isn't so much in the answers we come up with, but knowing what question. to ask what task to take on. And I often think that's overlooked. Welcome to the On Wisdom podcast with Igor Grossman and Charles Cassidy.
Over the next half an hour, we'll be dissecting the latest research from the emerging field of wisdom science. We'll discuss what it means for each of us and society in terms of reasoning and living more wisely in the 21st century.
We are very excited to welcome our guest today, David Dunning. David is Professor of Psychology at the University of Michigan, where he is Director of the Self and Social Insight Lab. His work focuses primarily on the accuracy with which people view themselves and their peers.
In his most widely cited work, he showed that people tend to hold flattering opinions of their competence, character and prospects that cannot be justified from objective evidence. Work that has been featured in numerous newspapers, magazines, radio and television around the world. In a 2021 list published by Stanford University, David was listed as one of the world's 2% most cited psychological scientists. Welcome to the show, David Dunning. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here.
Before we get into the questions, we're going to be talking a lot about how flawed we all are at assessing our own abilities. So the obvious question to start with is, can you share... how you see your own abilities when it comes to talking about flawed self-assessments to an enthusiastic public audience, and how likely is it that that is an accurate assessment? Well, I refrain from making such assessments because if I...
Take my own research to heart. I'm the worst person to evaluate how good or how bad I am at evaluating my own flaws, if you will. And my only hope is that I strive to be better and tomorrow or next year I will be better. And that's what I try to do. But I just try to learn. and share what I learn and hope that other people get something out of it. That's my promise. But I don't spend too much time evaluating what I do because I know I'm the worst possible person for it.
It makes complete sense. Very consistent with your research. I respect that. I'm going to share a couple of quotes and then hand over to Igor. So these are quotes that turned up in some of your work, David. The first one was... From a Philadelphia resident, I'm in Philadelphia right now as we speak, Benjamin Franklin, there are three things extremely hard, steel, a diamond, and to know oneself. That's pretty much the theme of today's episode.
And then connecting nicely to self-awareness and its link to wisdom, which is the theme of the podcast. And again, from one of your papers, Lao Tzu, he who knows others is learned. He who knows himself is enlightened, which suggests how hard it is to know oneself. Very much what we're going to be talking about today. Right. So let me start by asking you the standard thing that we ask everybody, David.
Wisdom can mean many things. What does it mean to you? For instance, do you think, is there anything about wisdom that may be overlooked or perhaps counterintuitive to... general public? Well, I think if you ask me that question on any single day, I'm going to come up with a different answer, and I hope that's wise, because wisdom should mean many things. But today's answer...
Well, in general, I would say that it really should be, wisdom really should be about adapting to the world in one's circumstances. choosing good answers and not worrying about choosing the right answers. But if I think there's anything counterintuitive or something that isn't necessarily... isn't necessarily emphasized as much as it should, is the idea that wisdom isn't necessarily knowing a good or right answer. It's really knowing...
the right or good question to ask. Because I often think that the good life or success or... a pleasurable existence often isn't so much in the answers we come up with, but knowing what question. to ask what task to take on. And I often think that's overlooked. People just dive in into whatever it is and they don't ask if they're really asking the right question. And right now we're at the beginning of the academic year.
graduate students involved and they're asking questions about x y and z and they're not sitting back and asking what really should i be asking and that's something i think is overlooked yeah i like i like what you're saying because I also find it so challenging whenever I'm asked, like, well, you said this is wisdom, but what about those outcomes? Are those wise? And I find it so difficult because you would never be able to.
justify things by looking at the outcomes. Because the answers, they are always context dependent. They are always perspective dependent. And it's often much more about the process. I have another question, a follow-up to this. Many people think of wisdom as being related to morality. What do you think? Do you think morality is necessary for wisdom? Or are these two concepts distinct? And if so, how?
Well, it's hard for me to think of wisdom without morality. You have to have some sort of principle in mind, or maybe it's purpose. If I reflect on my own life, there are certainly principles I live by, and I can think of them as moral principles. That is, I no longer practice explicitly the religion that I grew up in, but I certainly take the fundamental principles that were taught by that religion, and they do form a moral basis.
for how I act and how I judge myself and how I construe wise decisions. And I can't think of doing it any other way. But I also think in terms of wisdom and morality, I think thinking about purpose. is also a very important concept. One should act with a purpose in mind. And purpose is often informed by morality. What good do you want to bring into the world?
So if you're thinking of the avenue of purpose, you also have to weave in the idea of morality as well. So I can't imagine wisdom without morality. That's interesting. So getting more practical now, if you were going to suggest one thing that people could do that might lead to them making wiser decisions, what might that be?
This is going to be a little bit of a stem binder. I would tell them to read Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People like I did when I was 11 years old. Now, for a very specific reason. Okay. Because if you read the book, you realize the book is really telling you to get over yourself and listen to other people. Step outside of yourself. Don't think about yourself always. The modern terminology that's in fashion today would be don't center on yourself. Listen to other people.
understand their perspective, try to emphasize with their point of view, try to gain what they understand about the world. And often I find that starting at 11, just listening to people, I learned a lot about the world and about life and what you can do. Not talking about myself, but... figuring out from other people. And that truly came from that book, which I...
I really don't know what else was in that book. I've forgotten. But this idea of don't sit down on yourself and really try to see it from the other person's point of view was a powerful lesson. That's really helped me sort of get a perspective on how to prosecute life, so to speak. That's fascinating. Yeah. I mean, so how did you get to this book at 11? It was around. You know, I was in a small town. There was not much to do. And so I picked it up.
and read it. And, you know, when you're an 11 year old. 11 years old other people are a mystery so I thought it might help but it was a novel idea actually don't talk listen to others and it turned out to be a powerful idea I vividly remember that book too. I was a few years older than you, I think. I was, I think, 15 when somebody gave it to me. And for me... In addition to what you said, which I also found really striking, it was this notion that people like to talk.
And they just let them talk. That was a profound insight. And you learn things. And it's a little bit of a frustration because the most interesting people I know... also know this so they don't speak they ask you questions and so the most interesting people i know are frustrating because they just sit there and they ask me questions And I want to sit there and ask them questions. And so, you know, we get into this bizarre wrestling of interrogatories, if you will. But I know they're interesting.
But I have to outweigh them until I can start asking them questions because I know they know things and I know why they know things. But I've also found that that sort of opens up worlds to me. By the way, this also extends to things like don't go see American movies. You've seen that movie. Go see movies from other countries. You'll learn things. Don't read books that are from a genre you've read before. Read other genres.
expose yourself to other worlds. It's the same principle. Step outside of yourself. Center on someplace different. I heard recently of a Google engineer, I think, who made an app. where he was aspiring to do the same thing, to step out of his own sort of familiar routines. And the app would order you an Uber at every time the same day and take you to somewhere random.
in the city which you didn't know beforehand you just get in and off you go so it sounds kind of terrifying but it would definitely get break you out of your familiar pants definitely terrifying depends on the city that may or may not be the safe thing to do Well, it would lead you to different experiences. No, they may not be pleasant experiences, but at least it would be different experiences. Yeah.
Yeah, I take that back. I think like in most cities, well, I mean, you can probably block some areas, but yeah. No blocking, no blocking allowed. No blocking allowed at all. This leads me back to your first question about what's counterintuitive. Often life is about what question you ask.
And I was thinking about this because it used to be that if I went to a new city, you know, the question I would ask is, okay, what are the museums, what are the restaurants to go to? That's the question I would ask. And now the question I ask at the hotel or whatever is, where do the locals go?
And it's a more open question, but it's actually going to tell me more about the city. If a person can tell me, this is where the locals will go. Now, maybe the locals don't want me to go there. But it gives me more of an experience of the place than... the standard places where tourists go. But basically your experience of a place isn't the answer to the question. It's really what question do you ask?
Okay, so I have another question. Among our wisdom questions, we have one that is not about the individual psychology, but about something else. Namely... What could we change on a structural level about our communities that would lead us to make wiser decisions as a society? That's an interesting question because I have an answer that I don't know if it answers your question. All right. And it's everybody should be on a jury in a legal case. Interesting.
And what does that mean? It's because being a jury in a legal case forces you to be in a situation that matters. It forces you to work in a group. It forces you to talk and think things through. And often people who are on a jury consider it to be one of the most significant experiences in their life. But really what it is, it's a group experience. It's a group project. And it's a significant one that's on offer.
And people should take it. And unfortunately, I'm disqualified from it. I teach psychology and law. No lawyer is going to allow me to be on a jury. That's just the way it is. Is that right? I didn't know that. Oh, yeah. No lawyer wants me on a jury. Now, every lawyer wants the other lawyer to exclude me. That's the game of chicken that will be played. But I could be in mock juries, but I won't be allowed in a real jury. I'm too dangerous.
But I was thinking about this, and a lot of, let's say, any wisdom I think I've acquired really comes from... groups that I was involved in where we formed and we were really on our own to do whatever project we did. And this was usually, usually during my teenage years. So I was in theater groups. We did plays. I was in a mime troupe. We did our own shows. We came up with our own skits.
I was in junior achievers, and so I was in different companies. I was in a company that published a weekly newspaper, and I did the ads. And one year, my company did a weekly radio broadcast and so forth. But it taught you how to do projects, how to be organized, how to deal with people. how to be a friend, how to deal with interpersonal conflict, how to deal with freeloaders, how not to be the freeloader, how to do it yourself.
I think about this, there was a lot of wisdom that came from those experiences. And I think we do live in more of a... bullying alone society if you know the robert putnam book and i do worry about that i actually do worry about our educational system because often it's based on individual work and individual achievement
But a lot of adult life really depends on working in groups, but we don't train that. We don't train that form of wisdom. And I found that training and that wisdom to be essential. when I was growing up. And maybe it still exists, I don't know. But I have found that activity to have been essential for my life and also some of the best friends and some of the best experiences I had when I was young.
But that would be my answer. So I don't know if it touches upon wisdom, but I consider it to be a segment of wisdom that matters. And so that would be my answer. That's really interesting. One of the things teachers will say about group projects is they... prefer to work with individuals because it's easier for grading that often is often it's about the grading the other end of things you know rather than like what would actually be better um so yeah that's a tricky part of it
Oh, I know. That's exactly why we need to do things in groups. Right, right. I would argue that is an argument for why we should be doing groups. And by the way, in medical education, there is a movement in medical school. schools to do more group-based training, to do... case-based training where you just throw a medical case, a mock medical case at a group, and they have to solve it because it more matches what the students are going to face in the real world.
problem-based instruction. And that seems to me to be more wild and woolly, but so is the world. Yeah, you speak about that in one of your papers, I think, as a better way of kind of doing things in terms of rather than, you know, the classic model of just like learning a bunch of facts individually. Oh, that's absolutely right, because the problem in terms of learning is not only learning the facts, but you also have to learn how to apply the facts. Right.
And that's often a step that is left out of education because just learning the facts, you can leave a student very satisfied. It's the application that's important. it can certainly leave the student not very satisfied. But once they master that, you can leave everybody satisfied. I do think group projects will probably have a comeback with generative AI.
Because I already see now, but when I was thinking about how to change my syllabus, my curriculum for... the next half a year for the courses I'm teaching, be it undergraduate or graduate, but especially undergraduate, I just cannot do any of those singular activities that students can do at home because...
there is no way to check. And group projects seem to be one of the natural things that you will sort of gravitate to, even though they're harder to grade, but at least there will be some kind of sense of accountability because students will probably...
will not be as tempted. Or maybe they will use it differently. But anyway, so that's one of my probably highly inaccurate predictions. But probably some of the group are coming back. Well, don't tell the students in my class yet, but that's actually...
One of the things I'm going to do for some short papers that in my graduate class, I'm going to ask the students to present their... paper to chat GPT and have a conversation with it in an interactive way so that'll be the group project and then after a few weeks they'll start having conversations with each other so instead of doing individual papers Chad GPT is going to be a member of the group.
I've actually suggested that ChatGPT actually do a presentation in our brown bag, if you remember that, Igor. No one else is going for that, but I think we absolutely have to have ChatGPT as a speaker. But ChatGPT might be a way to produce more interactive activities with our students. And so I wouldn't...
There is a potential, yes. Yeah, there's a potential. The only problem with chat GPT is it's just too damn polite. Yeah. Should we get some sort of plug-in where you ask it to pepper its responses with expletives? I think I would like that, actually, as an activity. As you said, David, I was on a jury, and I do consider it one of the most important experiences of my life.
Yeah. It was very ennobling and it sort of, especially as we can be all quite cynical about the legal system, it was actually like, oh, this is... an extraordinary process, like all these people coming together, trying to find out the truth. It seemed very, even though you imagine it's adversarial, actually both sides of the case seem to be trying to get at what actually happened here. Anyway.
I really liked it. So yes, I thoroughly recommend it. And I've also heard of people going to extreme lengths to get out of jury service. But I think your move of getting a law degree just to get out of jury services, that's pretty extreme. Well, yeah, that would be pretty extreme because it wouldn't be very satisfying.
Okay, so I wanted to ask a few questions about some of your work. I'll start with the very sort of centrepiece that a lot of people will be familiar with your work, which is the Dunning-Kruger effect. So I wonder if you... could just super briefly tell us what it is and its implications for education and the workplace. I mean, it applies in so many areas. We just tried to pick a couple that might be the most relevant.
Sure. I guess I would define the Dunning-Kruger effect, as it's come to be called, as the fact that those who lack expertise lack... the expertise that they need to recognize what expertise they lack or rather those who don't know are not in a position to know what they don't know. That is, to know what you don't know, you first have to have knowledge of what you don't know. And those who don't know are just not in that position.
So, or another way to put it is we all make decisions. We all make the decisions we think are the most reasonable. Not all the decisions we make are the most reasonable, but we're not in a position. to recognize their unreasonable nature. That is the Dunning-Kruger effect. And I should mention that Justin Kruger and I did not name it the Dunning-Kruger effect. It was named somewhere.
in the internet. And I've asked Chad GPT to identify the moment in which it was named the Dunning-Kruger effect, and it told me it was me, and I told it that it wasn't me. And it apologized profusely. But I'd love to know who named it the Dunning-Kruger effect because just my article think that our family names are forever going to be associated. with ignorance, incompetence, naivete, gullibility, and the like. But its implications are that people who are incompetent or inexpert
are just simply not in a position to recognize it. They're confident in themselves because they're not in a position to recognize that they're Confidence is not justified. They're just not in a position to recognize it. It's not ego. They're being honest. They just can't recognize it. And that's also true in education. I mean, students who think they're ready for the test, but they're not, honestly think they're ready for the test. until they get the crushing feedback. And that's the effect.
That's interesting that you make the distinction it's not about ego. It's just these people don't have access to the information that they need to make a better informed decision. That's right. What about the workplace? You know, obviously the implications for education seem pretty clear, but for people in offices and labs across the country, how might this play out?
Well, it plays in a number of ways. One is that people may apply for jobs or try to go into professions that they don't have the skills for or don't have preparation for. It may mean that people maintain a level of work that they think is fine. and maybe they should get promoted when in fact they're nowhere near that level of work. In fact, there is work showing, and this was work done in the Navy, that...
Naval officers' beliefs that they deserve a promotion was uncorrelated with whether or not they actually got a promotion, whereas other people's impressions of whether or not they deserved a promotion actually was highly correlated. with whether or not they got a promotion, so that people may not improve because they don't know that they need to improve. So, um...
So there may be a lack of human capital, as economists say. People don't improve. They don't acquire skills because they don't recognize that there are skills that they need to acquire. And this may happen at the individual level, may also happen at the organizational levels. So medical labs, for example, may be putting in mediocre performance because they literally don't know higher performance as possible. in terms of medical outcomes.
That's really interesting. I mean, I'm kind of also would love to know whether it breaks down across gender. Like, my hunch, obviously, based on nothing, but you can guide us, is that it might turn out more in men than women, maybe.
um so that's one question i was interested in and also like what you know cross-culturally what does this look like again hunch might be individualistic cultures we might see more of it than collective cultures but uh you know a couple of distinctions that i'd love to to hear your thoughts on Yeah, in terms of gender, the picture seems to be a little complicated in that there are some skills that are gender identified. That is...
Like science, when you think of a scientist, you tend to think of a man. And so men tend to think more of their scientific talents than women do. And once that kicks in, well then... men will tend to overestimate themselves more than women will. But there are some things, like verbal skills, that women will tend to think better of themselves than men and then things will start to flip, even outer flip, for example. In terms of culture, it's interesting because we have some global data.
From the TIMS, the Trends in Math and Science Studies that's done every four years with eighth graders and fourth graders are tested out globally on math and science. And not in terms of individualism versus collectivism, but there is a cultural dimension that's referred to as long-term versus short-term orientation. Long-term orientation is what it is. It's people think in terms of long time horizons. And short-term oriented cultures tend to think about the here and now.
It turns out – now, actually, as a background, I should mention the Dunning-Kruger effect should be impervious to culture. The theory is cognitive. It is – If you don't have skill, you just don't recognize you don't have skill. Turns out there's something culturally going on between long-term oriented cultures and short-term oriented cultures.
And the first thing that's going on in long-term oriented cultures is that long-term oriented cultures emphasize math and science. Those students do better. By the way, overall, they think they're worse in math than science, subjectively. It's interesting. They do the best. They think they're worse at it. But they do better, and they do better.
The worst math and science kids in long-term oriented countries know enough to know that they aren't doing very well compared to everybody else. Short-term oriented. Those kids aren't doing very well. The second thing that's happening with long-term oriented countries is their teachers are very happy to give them. try to put it, corrective feedback about their math skills or lack thereof. And so they're more aware of when they're performing poorly.
So this doesn't track with individualistic cultures or collectivist cultures, which is the opposite end of the poll. It does track with this, do you have a long-term orientation? Which means you're not really worried about who you are in yourself, who you are now. You're worried about the self that you're going to be in the future and are you going to improve into that? What skills are you going to have in the future?
Those kids, when they're performing poorly, know that they're performing poorly. Short-term oriented cultures are more concerned about their... self-image and their reputation and they tend not to know when they're performing poorly that's interesting and i'm at is the u.s short-term oriented is that It tips that way. It tips that way. And teachers don't give a lot of negative feedback. Yeah. So one of the things that...
If I was talking about this effect with friends, I'm sure this idea would come up that, you know, not knowing that you're bad at something might be helpful to make you take... have the courage to take the steps on a path to actually learning a new skill and if you were you know really acutely aware of how bad you were at something you just might never try new things um what are your thoughts about that
It's interesting because not knowing you're bad may make you complacent. So it's a double-edged sword. I mean, if you think you're already good, you don't really work that hard. And so you don't become good. But if you know you're bad, you know you have to work hard, you... work hard to become good. The key there, though, is do you think you can become good? So it becomes a little bit of a Carol Dweck.
situation, do you think if you work hard, will you become good? That is, will you grow? Through effort, through scheming, will there be growth? Or do you think that if you're bad, you're always going to be bad. It's fixed. That's it. It's over. It really is what... theory do you have about what hard work and scheming will bring you? That's really...
And by the way, that's also a characteristic of long-term oriented cultures. They're very much into a growth mindset that if you work hard, you will improve. That seems to be a feature that's associated with those cultures. truth that's interesting so it's not so much about where you're at that will determine what it's about like if you put in work can you move that it's where you're going exactly yeah right There is some research that's come out recently which...
Some researchers have said, you know, if you account for X, Y and Z, they don't see the Dunning-Kruger effect turning up. I wonder if you could talk us through some of these kind of misconceptions and like what's going on there. Oh, well, it is sort of interesting because there is some work. My take on it is that it's somewhat repetitive. making the claim that the Dunning-Kruger effect is just merely a statistical artifact, which is regression to the mean. That is that...
We know that people's perceptions of their ability is not perfectly correlated with reality. So if you look at people who don't have much skill. by definition, their perceptions of themselves can't be that extremely negative. And people who have really good ability, under regression of the mean, Their perception themselves can't be that extremely positive. So it's a given that you're going to get the Dunning-Kruger effect, and that's all it is.
And my take on it is that, well, what you've just... done is re-describe the Dunning-Kruger effect that you haven't explained the Dunning-Kruger effect. That is you can make that claim But that is critiquing maybe the first two studies we did in 1999. But in the almost 25 years since, there's been a lot of studies that have gone far beyond that. In fact, we did.
A nine study... a series of paper with nine studies in it in 2008 that exactly looked at is this merely a statistical artifact and found that it wasn't. There was a paper that came out a couple years ago that looked at the explanation I gave at the beginning that... Those who aren't in the know don't know that they don't know or are worse at judging.
the quality of their answers and showed that it did play a role in the fact that people at the bottom did misjudge themselves more. So there's positive evidence of that. There's just a ton of there's a ton of work since our first two studies that show you that's not merely a statistical artifact. And it's the. argument that the Dunning-Kruger effect is just a statistical artifact is interesting for a number of reasons. First, it only looks at the first two studies.
But it doesn't really consider the 25 years of research since. Second, there is a research on regression to the mean. And the people who critique the Duny-Kruger effect never reference.
this independent research or literature. And we've done, you know, we've looked at this literature, we've used techniques from this literature that doesn't explain our effect. And actually, So we've, in some sense, those who claim that the Dunning-Krub effect is just a statistical artifact are asking the wrong question.
One way to describe their claim is that the Dunning-Kruger effect is that it's just statistical noise. And if you use measures with lots of statistical noise, you get the Dunning-Kruger effect. But that's not the way to test their account. The way to test their account is to come up with a measure that has zero statistical noise and see if you remove the Tunning-Kruger effect. which is something we've done. And when we do it, we still get the Dunning-Kruger effect. So...
But one of the things you mentioned is, sorry to go on, but one of the things you mentioned is, are there a ton of misconceptions about the Dunning-Kruger effect? And one of the interesting things... is that the Dunning-Kruger effect is about getting things wrong and not knowing you're getting things wrong. But one of the interesting things about the effect is a lot of people have misconceptions about the effect.
or misdescribe the effect and don't seem to know that they're describing the effect. What are your favorite examples? Well, my favorite examples, I don't know if they're favorites, is that often the effect is described as the... ignorant or the incompetent are the most confident people in the world. No, we didn't say that. We said that they're overly confident relative to how poorly they're doing. They're not as confident as top reformers.
But given how poorly they're doing, they shouldn't be as confident as they are. But some people have morphed that into they're the most confident people in the world. Right, right. The second is if you... Google images of the Dunning-Kruger effect. I did this yesterday. The picture you get is 19 times out of 20 is nothing. That we actually did. You get this curvy-wervy thing.
which is about time and being a beginner, which is about when you're a rank beginner, you're not very confident, but soon you become wildly confident, and then you suddenly realize you shouldn't be so confident, so suddenly you have to space. and you're less confident. And then you rehabilitate yourself and you become more confident. So you get this wavy line. It's a beautiful line. It's actually... very complex. It's very plausible. It's more interesting than anything we have proposed in 1999.
It's actually the Gartner hype curve, by the way. It's people's confidence in new technology is really what it is. But it's not the Dunning-Kruger effect. Now, it turns out... that we've actually studied whether confidence when you're a beginner actually follows this curve. And happily, I can report this is what happens when beginners start a completely novel task. We had participants online enter a post-apocalyptic world.
where America was being overrun by zombies and were nothing if not fashionable. And... Because their supervisor had to go to the CDC, they were left to diagnose zombie diseases on their own. Now they didn't know exactly how to do it. They had to learn. They were going to get feedback after every case whether they were right, but they had to go through 60 cases and diagnose, was this a person healthy or did they have a zombie disease variant? And through the 60 cases, people learned.
But what was interesting is they started off very unconfident about their diagnoses. But after 10 or 15 cases, suddenly they were bursting with confidence well over how well they were actually doing. And after a few more cases, they weren't so sure. They began to realize they were making errors.
So their confidence leveled off, decreased a little bit, and then after a while they began an uptick in their confidence again. So we got something that looks like what you will see if you Google the Dunning-Kruger effect, but which is something we actually... never talked about so there is something that we talked about called the beginner's bubble that beginners start cautious but then their confidence far outruns
any actual increase in performance. People think they've got it far sooner than they've actually got it. Right, so you know you know nothing at the start, then you... Like you leap to thinking you've got a model that explains it. Okay, I get how this works. Exactly. And then you find out, oh, no, that model isn't quite right. It's a bit more complicated. Exactly. Interesting.
And by the way, that matters because there's something in aviation called the killing zone, which is beginning pilots know. They're in danger and they don't commit mistakes that will lead to injury or fatality. But roughly around 600, 800 flight hours, they begin to make those mistakes. because they begin to be in that beginner's bubble or that killing zone. They begin to relax. And so it's not rank beginners.
who are a danger to themselves and to others, but those with a little bit of experience. And Air Force flight instructors know this. That's what they tell their trainees all the time. You are not a danger, but you will be a danger. A little learning is a dangerous thing. Oh, yeah, exactly. So I want to switch gears here a little bit. Continue talking about the misperceptions, but switch a little bit from the Dunning-Kruger effect to broader self-assessments. So it seems like...
While the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests poorly skilled people are the worst at assessing their abilities. In fact, all of us are pretty flawed when it comes to making self-assessments. David, can you talk us through some of the reasons we are so poor at this supercritical skill? Well, there are a number of reasons that switch depending on the type of skill that we're talking about. I mean, there are assessments of competence and there are assessments of character.
Competence, the problem there is that there's so much we don't know. What we don't know is simply invisible to us. The classic phrase now that's permeated into the culture is that there are unknown unknowns, essentially. They're just invisible to us. There are more possibilities, more risks. Out there, we just don't know. Plus, our thoughts and beliefs are contaminated by misbeliefs, and they're going to lead us astray.
They seem reasonable to us. They are plausible. They just happen to be wrong. That's the issue of competence. In terms of character, I mean, moral judgments or... ethical judgments or self-control judgments. The issue there is we over-believe our ability to be captains of our own fate. We're much more profited around by circumstances than we think.
This is the classic fundamental attribution error, if you will. We think we're in control when it really is the environment that is in control. And that leads us to... succumb to temptations or to not be the better angel we thought we were when the moment of truth comes. And so it's these sorts of perceptions that lead us to overly rosy views of ourselves. That it's the objective self doesn't map on to the subjective view that we have about ourselves.
But the specific reason why we have overbeliefs about ourselves depends on what's the exact context or what's the exact circumstance that you're talking about. It's interesting that you mentioned this kind of role of being masters of your own destiny and so on. I guess I right away think...
Again, about the cultural differences you brought up earlier about this kind of more long-term oriented versus short-term oriented people, people potentially thinking about it in a... more holistic fashion, and consider the various contextual factors, which you by necessity have to do when you are thinking about the long term, because many more things may come to mind.
Do you think or do you have evidence that these people could potentially be, beyond the Dunning-Kruger effect, less susceptible to this type of self-assessment biases? Well, I think they're beyond the Duny Kruger effect only because it's not an individual thing. People aren't allowed to be captains of their own fate. That is, their society trains them up.
So they escape the Dunning-Kruger effect because they're not incompetent. Or if they are more weakly skilled, they're skilled enough that they can see it. But also their environment makes sure that they know, if you will. I mean, these are cultures that post how well each and every person is done publicly, by name. In the classroom, as opposed to the American situation where it's illegal for me to make even one step toward making everybody's scores public.
In any class that I teach. In fact, if someone calls me up and asks, is so-and-so in my class, it's legal for me to say yes or no. Oh, wow. Yeah, that's American law. So, oh, yeah. I'm glad I do know that. I should check if it's true in Canada. But nobody called me. I don't think I have a phone anymore. Maybe they can send me an email. Well, in American universities, they have people, so you don't get that call.
but but yeah there are just cultural differences in terms of how much people are going to know no I once had a So there are differences in terms of, you know, are students going to get corrective feedback? I once had an undergraduate from Singapore who had a conversation with me because she was absolutely mad that she could not get her American college professors. to give her negative feedback. Oh, interesting. And so she was spitting mad, and then she glared at me.
And I remember, and I kind of wanted to explain, I'm from the Midwest. I've been giving you feedback, but it's in Midwestern code. You may not understand it. The opposite culture in this regard. Oh, that's absolutely right. I mean, the Midwest is honest, but you have to know the code. I have a full up question to this. What does this widespread lack of self-awareness actually imply for the field of psychological science where we have so many measures?
I mean, the majority of our field is based on self-assessments, self-reports, and especially as we move towards more online studies in the last 15, 20 years. How can we rely on them? Can you rely on them? I think there are some places where you can rely on them because people will be blatantly honest about who they are and what they are. I mean, the classic case is Machiavellianism. I mean, you can go to a person and say, you know,
are you Machiavellian, you know, a schemer, a user of people and Machiavellians are very happy to tell you yes. But there are some places like, okay, do you engage in self-deception? Yeah, a self-deceiver is going to tell you that. And in the last 10 years, there have been a number of people measuring intellectual humility. And intellectually... Humble person, yeah, is going to boast about that. Yeah. There's a group who's recognized that might be an issue. So I think.
Because of this, you really do have to be mindful if you're trying to gauge individual differences or a personality difference as to whether this is... A place where people will be honest. Because people will be honest, surprisingly. Or if it's a place where you really need to move from a self-report to a self-performance.
Like give people a chance to reveal that they're intellectually humble or reveal that they're self-deceptive. And I think there's a growing recognition that there are some... personality differences where you have to give people a chance to reveal themselves through performance as opposed to just saying things about themselves. Well, this has been long known. Yeah. For example, in terms of asking people about racism or sexism.
You just don't go up to a person and say, hey, are you a racist? There are other places where you have to adopt something a little bit more. subterranean and clever to really find out where this person stands I find it was in my experience was often is tricky be it for instance about intellectual humility or other sort of cherished qualities like when you ask those things very abstractly I often don't even know where to start how to assess it because I don't keep a logbook of me
indicating every single time how I acted, whether this was intellectually humble or not so I can create some kind of a profile analysis on the spot about how I am in terms of my intellectual humility in general. It's not part of our everyday vocabulary. No, I think it's true. It's also the case that for some people, they may come from a family or a culture or a setting.
where they don't define it as a thing. It's just what people do. Now, it is intellectual humility, but they don't define it as a thing. That's right. You don't ascribe, like give a label to it. Yeah, it's just what people do. Yeah, so exactly. So what I find is like instead of asking people who they are in general.
overall, without any context, if you put it in a particular situation and ask them, what did you do? And give them a set of characteristics and it's just reflected on those. That seems to track it a little bit better. I mean, it's still kind of self-report. But that's which makes some sense, at least in terms of empirical evidence for me. No, I agree with that. I was going to go to our final question. Obviously, we've been speaking about...
you know, flaws in self-assessments. The theme of the podcast is wisdom. Now, some sort of self-knowledge, knowing thyself, is pretty central to wisdom. Metacognition is a key aspect of it. What can we, having discussed this, what can we do? to improve our self-knowledge it seems like like you know benjamin franklin said it's as hard as steel he didn't quite say that but i like the way that i put that um so what can we do to improve our self-knowledge and as a consequence um maybe
become wiser well one of the things I've been thinking about lately is toying around with the idea that In some sense, failures in metacognition are inevitable and overconfidence is inevitable in particular because we're always going to choose to do what we think is the most reasonable thing to do. And so there are going to be failures. The real question is, how do we manage those failures?
Maybe the answer has been there all along and it isn't there in terms of an individual thing, but it's always been there in terms of how professions. choose to manage overconfidence in the decisions of the individuals within the profession. So, for example, in aviation, Overconfidence is handled by making sure that pilots go through their checklists. They have no discretion.
at least in the American tradition, Anglo-American tradition, you make sure legal decisions are better calibrated, more just, more true, by making sure everybody sees both the prosecution side and the defense's side, or the plaintiff's side and the defense's side. You see the pro case and the opposition case. So you both get the confirming case and the disconfirming case.
That's very important in order to weigh through the evidence. Doctors don't make diagnoses. They make differential diagnoses. They don't ask what's going on. They ask what's going on and what else could be going on. And then they shave off, they do disconfiratory tests, if you will. And all these professions are, if you think about it, all these procedures are being done. in order to stave off overconfidence and to come to better decisions.
They're really there to come to better decisions and to ward off overconfidence. So I've been playing around with the idea that if you, oh, in science, of course, if you, as I do. Think of science mostly as a profession that at its heart is a profession of assassination. That is, you have an idea. You do a study that you collect data to see if you can assassinate your idea. That's what that is.
You put your idea through an ordeal to see if it survives a data test. That's at the heart of Paparian approach to science. Really, data collection is an act of disconfirmation. Or you have to at least have that in there. So if you sort of borrow principles from the professions, that can help. instill better metacognition and maybe improve decision making. Because there are going to be metacognitive errors.
One way to think about it is what are the best practices that I adopt to manage, minimize and manage those errors?
I think it's the way to think about it. And right now, the idea I'm playing around with is what can we steal from medicine, the law and aviation and whatnot? Yeah, that's really interesting. You're saying it seems that the professions have not tried to really get... to the root of it they've just come up with a practical way of avoiding when it does go wrong rather than trying to you know
solve it at the base like it's going to happen yeah headed headed off at the pass yeah yeah and if you take a look a lot of what they say looks like it was reinvented by psychological research uh a judgment decision making it elsewhere But...
But that's sort of the game I've been playing with is what can we learn from the professions in terms of what to adopt as individuals in our everyday life. If you've been thinking about this a little bit, what would be a couple of examples of what that might look like for... for an individual who's just trying to sort of know themselves better in their day-to-day life? Well, I'm trying to... Okay, so...
I won't go into details. It's a graduate student having interpersonal difficulty and instead of leaping to a conclusion today, I sat down sort of like a doctor and said, okay, what are the three most likely scenarios of what's going on? So I didn't leap to, oh, this is what's, you know, that is the high base rate thing. But I said, okay, there are two other possibilities I have to rule out before I go in and start talking to people.
So I acted more like a doctor trying to make a diagnosis rather than a... Quick acting, I've got other things to do, academic, who has an issue that I need to address. The thing about aviation is that it's a repeatable event and you have to have a repeatable event. And aviation... It works, but, you know, I bet there are a lot of things that are not as cut and dried as it may sound as well. So I'm not surprised. Yeah, and it's more of a structure.
It's a set of technical checks in addition to it's not just focusing on de-biasing your cognition or your metacognition, which is, I think, a very different type of beast than checking all the devices. on the plane. That's exactly right. What you'd have to do is you'd have to do some study about where do errors occur. where the most common errors occur. And you also have instruments that are designed to already sort of head off those errors as well. I mean, aviation has something like 100 years.
I've had enough error to begin before you even get to a checklist. I mean, if you want to know, okay, where has errors in judge, which area has done the best? trying to prevent errors in judgment. It's aviation. But they've been at it for 100 years and they've spent billions and billions of dollars on equipment as well as human psychology.
in order to head things off. And so, yeah, the checklists already have an easier job. Yeah. And medicine, I was sorry, I was just going to say medicine has famously not been so good at improving its error rate. Compared to aviation. I'm going to disagree on that. Well, no, it's better. But I'd have to say it's... And it's only recently that it's really integrated error management into its teaching. And some of the errors, I mean, but some of them are pretty blunt.
I remember once I was having eye surgery and my eye surgeon came in and had a nice conversation with me. And then he ended it with, oh, by the way, it's your right eye that we're operating on today, right? And I went, yeah. He went, okay, good. He signed my, you know, my face on the right eye. And then I recognized, oh, that's because there's a literature on wrong side surgery. This whole conversation was to make sure it was my right eye.
This was an error check. This is to make sure he operated on the correct eye. And, okay, if that's where medicine is at, I mean, it's late to the game, but at least it's at the game. It could have been a very cruel joke. Well, there's a literature on it, but it's now being incorporated into their training in the last 20 years. And so medicine is stepping up to the table.
So I'm impressed. David, thank you so much for being on the show today. We learned so much. We wanted to have you for so long. And then the pandemic came in between. Finally, at last, we could learn from you about the metacognition. You've been an inspiration for me for many years, including ways to improve wisdom measurements. And I'm genuinely glad we were able to get you.
Well, I'm glad to make the connection. I've been an admirer of both. And keep up the good work. And keep up with the podcast.