No, not Dorling Kindersley. Dunning–Kruger… I will confess, I only heard about it, oh maybe seven or eight years ago, but it is amazing how much we see it in daily life. You just have to pause and take it all in to appreciate that it is simple yet still complex and there is a lot of it out there!

None of us likes to be thought of as irrational, worse, racist, sexist or pretty much any other kind of ‘ist’ but it seems the victims of this distinctive kind of cognitive bias often just can’t help themselves and either fall over their feet, knuckles or tongues with the greatest of ease. Do you know anyone who talks a good talk but there’s not much there?

So what is it you might ask? In a nutshell, I see it as dummies overestimating their own abilities. I am no intellectual, I have been explicitly told that by a professional, but I am not a dummy and I am also not the sharpest tool in the shed. I think I am safe from this kind of bias, or at least I hope I am.

I do like to think that I have a keen sense of my own limitations and I think I am astute enough to not overestimate my abilities and knowledge. I generally won’t tackle something significant intellectually or physically if I don’t have a high degree of confidence that I will moderately successful. These DK’ers though, dive in headlong and genuinely believe that they know exactly what to do and exactly what is going on and they convince or try to convince all those around them that they are experts.

Sometimes we’ll even irksomely see someone get promoted into a senior position despite the fact that everyone knows that they aren’t too smart or that they are mostly bluster. How do they do it? Do the promoters really believe that person is the right person for the job? Those whose very pores sweat a kind of brusque overconfidence maybe intimidate those who are genuinely smart but who doubt themselves. Are we all just ground down by the DK’ers “illusory superiority” and overconfidence? We saw extreme caricatures of such people in the movie “don’t look up” and of course, global politics is littered with these types. Are they tricksters or do people really buy into the narratives?

When two biases collide

So what happens when you have a ‘dummy’ that encounters a simple problem but is convinced it is much more complex I wondered? Does that even happen? Isn’t that like DK bias slamming into Occam’s razor? It’s most likely going to end in a bloody mess…

I am sure quite a few of us also know individuals who always seem to seek to overcomplicate things. They are convinced that what you and I might see as the obvious simple explanation for something, is really something much more complex and much more elaborate. What if it’s the same person who is all blustery and overconfident?

As one article I read, stated, sometimes it takes a lot more effort to accept that the answer to a problem or situation is actually quite simple when we have invested a lot of energy in defining a much more complex root cause.

So what is one to do? Do you suffer the fool who with a little knowledge who is now convinced they are a de facto expert but then go to great lengths to explain to us that we cannot possibly challenge them on their knowledge and understanding of the topic because the topic is very complex? I am not sure. What I am sure of, is that if you can’t have something explained in somewhat simple terms then you either need to start paying more attention or you need to walk in the opposite direction!

Here’s the kicker though, DK Bias works in the opposite way too, apparently. We know it more commonly as imposter syndrome. A situation where someone quite smart and quite knowledgeable actually doubts themself on that topic.

So what do you say dear reader Where do you lie on the continuum of self-assessment in relation to your field of expertise? Whatever you do… don’t look up.

Footnotes:

“The Dunning-Kruger effect is named after the psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger. In their 1999 study, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”, Dunning and Kruger identified illusory superiority as a cognitive bias — which came to be called The Dunning-Kruger Effect.”[1]

Occam’s (or Ockham’s) razor is a principle attributed to the 14th-century logician and Franciscan friar William of Ockham.  Ockham was the village in the English county of Surrey where he was born it goes thus: “If you have two theories that both explain the observed facts, then you should use the simplest until more evidence comes along” [2]