Note that this is the first of a two-part exploration.

94% of college professors rank their work as “above average.” (1)  In a survey of engineers at one company, 42% thought their work ranked in the top 5% among their peers. (2)  When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Instead, like Mr. Wheeler (a bank robber who rubbed lemon juice on his face in the belief that it would render him invisible), they are left with the erroneous impression they are doing just fine. (3)

This became known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect — where incompetence masks one’s ability to recognize one’s own incompetence.

Dunning and Kruger suggest that, across many intellectual and social domains, it is the poorest performers who hold the least accurate assessments of their skill and performances, grossly overestimating how well their performances stack up against those of their peers. These are the performers who not only perform poorly, but who believe they perform well. Or, put another way, clueless yet confident.

Kruger and Dunning (1999) argued that this gross overconfidence occurs because those who lack skill simply are not in a position to accurately recognize the magnitude of their deficits. Their incompetence produces a double curse. First, their lack of skill, by definition, makes it difficult to produce correct responses and, thus, they make many mistakes. Second, this very same lack of skill also deprives them of success at the metacognitive task of recognizing when a particular decision is a correct or an incorrect one. For example, to produce a grammatically correct sentence, one must know something about the rules of grammar. But one must also have an adequate knowledge of the rules of grammar in order to recognize when a sentence is grammatically correct, whether written by one’s self or by another person. Thus, those who lack grammatical expertise are not in a position to accurately judge the quality of their attempts or the attempts of other people. In addition, because people tend to choose the responses they think are most reasonable, people with deficits are likely to believe they are doing quite well even when they are, in reality, doing quite poorly. [Why the unskilled are unaware: Further explorations of (absent) self-insight among the incompetent]

It is a statistical probability that everyone reading this sentence has encountered learners (or professionals or peers) who fit into this category. It is also possible that, depending on the skill area, many of us fit as well, a disquieting thought because believing that you don’t could mean that you do! It is notoriously difficult to work with those who aren’t aware that there’s a problem because their attention must be drawn to it — they must be made to somehow see and recognize it — before the specific error or propensity to err can be corrected. According to the authors of the study, however,

It seems that poor performers do not learn from feedback suggesting a need to improve. Hacker, Bol, Horgan, and Rakow (4) provided direct evidence for this failure to learn from feedback when they tracked students during a semester-long class. As time went on, good students became more accurate in predicting how they would do on future exams. The poorest performers did not— showing no recognition, despite clear and repeated feedback, that they were doing badly.

Given that feedback (presumably external and from an instructor) seemingly has little power to counter the problem, might self-assessment (internal and conducted by the individual) provide a more useful approach? Though if we admit that the dilemma is not just the error but the inability to recognize the error, we must wonder how useful self-assessment is at countering illusory superiority (the Dunning-Kruger Effect). Are the clueless-yet-confident able to somehow step beyond their incompetence to use self-assessment to improve a performance that they already believe was strong? Doesn’t recognition of incompetence mean that the Improvements area of a self-assessment would likewise miss the areas that truly do need to be improved? If this is something of a Catch 22, what about adding a dimension to the typical SII Self-Assessment that asks the individual to describe the ideal or ‘goal’ performance? Could this serve to begin making the perceptual error visible? It would certainly allow for the current performance to be more clearly compared to strong performance. What do you think?

1	Cross, P. (1977). Not can but will college teaching be improved? New Directions for Higher Education, 17, 1–15.
2	Zenger, T. R. (1992). Why do employers only reward extreme performance? Examining the relationships among performance, pay, and turnover. Administrative Science Quarterly, 37, 198–219.
3	Kruger, J. & Dunning, D. (1999). Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties of Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-assessments. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 77  (6), pp. 1121-1134.
4	Hacker, D. J., Bol, L., Horgan, D. D., & Rakow, E. A. (2000). Test prediction and performance in a classroom context. Journal of Educational Psychology, 92, 160–170.