Wednesday Wisdom

Who?

David Dunning is an American social psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Michigan who had a previous stint at Cornell University. He received his bachelor's degree from Michigan State in 1982 and Ph.D. from Stanford University in 1986, both in psychology. Justin Kruger received his BS in psychology from Santa Clara University in 1993 and received his Ph.D. in Social Psychology from Cornell University in 1999, but was fortunate as a grad student had the chance to meet and work with Dunning.

After reading a story in the newspaper about a 1995 botched bank robbery in Pittsburg PA, Dunning pondered how people make decisions with such over whelming confidence while being totally inept. The would-be robbers had discovered how lemon juice can be used for invisible writing and logically believed it could also make them invisible. Rather than wearing masks, the thieves covered their faces with lemon juice, believing they would be invisible to surveillance cams. Beyond the comical side of the story, this led Dunning to wonder how knowledge, competency, and confidence all intersect.

The Dunning-Kruger effect, coined by the psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger in 1999, is a cognitive bias in which poor performers greatly overestimate their abilities. Dunning and Kruger’s research shows that underperforming individuals “reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it.” This incompetence, in turn, leads them to “hold inflated views of their performance and ability.”

What they produced

The Dunning–Kruger effect is usually explained in the realm of epistemology philosophy by examining a person’s metacognitive abilities. Metacognition is an awareness of one's thought processes and an understanding of the patterns behind them. This approach is based on the idea that poor performers have not yet acquired the ability to distinguish between good and bad performances. They tend to overrate themselves because they do not see the qualitative difference between their performances and the performances of others. This has also been termed the "dual-burden account" since the lack of skill is paired with ignorance.

The Dunning-Kruger effect is a type of cognitive bias in which people believe they are smarter and more capable than they are. Essentially, low-ability people do not possess the skills needed to recognize their own incompetence. The combination of poor self-awareness and low cognitive ability leads them to overestimate their capabilities. However, this can also lead anyone of ability or knowledge to fall into this trap due to overconfidence in one's knowledge or skills.

2024: Why do we care?

The internet, television, and smartphones have given everyone access to information at a moment's notice. But given that access to information, does that make anyone a subject expert or even a critical thinker? The chart above shows how a little knowledge can lead to overconfidence and land you on top of "Mount Stupid" (or in jail like our naive robbers from Pittsburg). It's only upon acquiring further knowledge that we realize we've merely skimmed the surface of information, necessitating more in-depth study.

Humility and knowledge= Intellectual Humility

The hallmark of intelligence, according to Dunning, is being “good at knowing what we don’t know.” Have we heard this wisdom before? Wisdom like this comes from ancient Greek philosophers and writers, who understood the importance of humility and expressed it as hubris or the lack of humility. Greek mythology tells the tale of Icarus, whose father Daedalus made him wings of beeswax. Flying to the heavens, feeling like a god and not listening to his father Daedulus’ council, he flew too close to the sun and ending in his demise.

The Oracle of Delphi, also known as the Pythia, was a priestess in ancient Greece who served as a medium through which the god Apollo was believed to communicate with mortals. The Oracle was associated with the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, located on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. Delphi was considered the center of the world in ancient Greek religion and mythology and was a place to find guidance and wisdom from the gods. Socrates received a response from the Oracle of Delphi that proclaimed him as the wisest person which he found perplexing given he believed he held no special knowledge or wisdom.

From Plato's Dialogues, we get an account of the Greek philosopher Socrates response to the Oracle: "For I was conscious that I knew practically nothing...". Socrates is further quoted by Plato; “Pride divides men, humility joins them." He goes on to speak about intellectual humility, "I know that I know nothing", recognizing that he was perhaps wiser than others because he recognized his own ignorance.

Humility and knowledge were the foundations of Ancient Greece as far back as 450 BC. What can we learn from both the Ancient Greeks and Dunning-Kruger?

Whenever you meet someone who claims to know enough to be dangerous, take them at their word, and if you find yourself the smartest person in the room, find another room.

And now you know...

Thanks, Dad, for the gift of curiosity!

Philosophy is the art of thinking, the building block of progress that shapes critical thinking across economics, ethics, religion, and science.

METAPHYSICS: Literally, the term metaphysics means ‘beyond the physical.’ Typically, this is the branch that most people think of when they picture philosophy. In metaphysics, the goal is to answer the what and how questions in life. Who are we, and what are time and space?

LOGIC: The study of reasoning. Much like metaphysics, understanding logic helps to understand and appreciate how we perceive the rest of our world. More than that, it provides a foundation for which to build and interpret arguments and analyses.

ETHICS: The study of morality, right and wrong, good and evil. Ethics tackles difficult conversations by adding weight to actions and decisions. Politics takes ethics to a larger scale, applying it to a group (or groups) of people. Political philosophers study political governments, laws, justice, authority, rights, liberty, ethics, and much more.

AESTHETICS: What is beautiful? Philosophers try to understand, qualify, and quantify what makes art what it is. Aesthetics also takes a deeper look at the artwork itself, trying to understand the meaning behind it, both art as a whole and art on an individual level. A question an aesthetics philosopher would seek to address is whether or not beauty truly is in the eye of the beholder.

EPISTEMOLOGY: This is the study and understanding of knowledge. The main question is how do we know? We can question the limitations of logic, how comprehension works, and the ability (or perception) to be certain.