In keeping with a few of my recent posts, I’d like to mention a remarkable study that most people still haven’t heard of. This is a study that links competence in an area with an individual’s self-evaluated competence, and links these with training. Rather than describe it myself, I’ll first give you a link to a fantastic YouTube video describing the study (provided you can understand a british accent):
Turtle, that is an excellent question. I don’t know the answer, and I don’t believe anyone knows. To some degree it’s upbringing. If you’re raised in a family that “gives you training” from an early age – speaks logically and evaluates things reasonably – you’ll obviously be better at reasonable self-evaluation than you would’ve been otherwise.
But there is definitely a genetic component as well. Some people are naturally more logical than others, and others are naturally more egotistic or emotional.
The big question is, to what degree is it each, and exactly HOW do genetics play a role? These questions I can’t answer.
What that study showed was that on the average, an intellectually incompetent person (or what we typically refer to as “stupid”) will not recognize the errors that are due to their inability to comprehend and assess information and an intelligently competent person will not accept that others are really that incompetent. I have been preaching that for 20 years.
The cause of it, like in all mental errors, is one of unconscious presumption.
When people are inspired into greater presumption through stress, they very quickly and unconsciously rush to judgment on details (the devil is in the details) and thus form presumption before the cognitive mind has even been activated on the subject.
The incompetent person is incompetent due only to his inability to assess the situation sufficiently so as to respond with competence. Thus his mind is forming thoughts based on insufficient information which causes a bias. The information was perhaps available, but his mind did not access that memory due to being either in a hurry or merely due to insufficient accumulator space (temporary memory) with which to formulate a thought. Since any emotional attachment to the subject matter increases the urge to respond, presumption increases and the bias takes on the flavor and direction of the emotion.
With the more competent person, a similar effect occurs. The competent person can assimilate the information in his memories sufficiently on learned knowledge, but is often in such a hurry to “get it right” and proceed, he doesn’t pay that much attention to the abilities of others. He is usually attempting to make up for what he has accepted as insufficient mental skills by focusing only on the fruits of his endeavor to learn and be accepted as correct. Sometimes this is referred to as a hidden “inferiority complex” behind a veil of arrogance.
Due to the biased assessment of his own level of ability with respect to others, he both attempts to display that he is indeed acceptably intelligent as well as expecting others to see as much as he has seen on the subject matter. His gauge of relative intellectual compatibility is off due to his prior stressful acceptance that he was not good enough. He was, in effect, traumatized into a belief that he must intellectually perform better regardless of how well he might have already achieved.
The end result is that you get incompetent people who are frustrated that seemingly intelligent people are always so wrong and disagreeable and you get competent people who are always frustrated that others seem so unbelievably stupid for not seeing what is obvious to them. But in the midst of the conflict, neither can be certain as to which they are themselves.
Stress, anxiety, insecurity, terrorism all leading to unconscious presumptions - the make of the Planet of the Apes regardless of their intellectual potential.
We know through identical twin tests that there is a genetic component to competence / incompetence. But to the best of my knowledge, we haven’t identified the specific genes responsible for the effect yet. (With traits as broad as “competence”, often there are a vast number of genes involved, which makes their isolation exceedingly difficult.) Here I should caution you – I don’t know much about the action of specific genes on neurological performance, so it’s quite possible that researchers do know of such genes, but that I am unaware of their discovery.
In trying to get a ‘feel’ for what Dunning and Kruger meant by ‘competent’ and ‘incompetent,’ I went to wiki and found mostly literary characters–Batman and Jeeves (to which I would add Lord Peter Wimsey’s butler, Mervyn Bunter.) Has specialization taken away competence?
I don’t think I’m veering too far from the subject and I’m sure you’ll tell me if I am.
A competent person is someone who knows s/he can ‘rise to the occasion’ no matter what the occasion. S/he is surprised to find other people aren’t able to do the same, although ‘incompetent’ people are sure they can. On the one hand, you have the rather self-effacing ‘competent’ person who rates her/himself as if s/he’s no different from anyone else. On the other hand, you have the ‘incompetent’ person who’ll consistently rate her/himself as higher than s/he is because s/he believes in her/his own competency.
I found it interesting that while, even after training, the ‘incompetent’ person was able ‘score’ her/himself more accurately, s/he hadn’t really improved the skills needed to become competent. (I’ll knock off the political correctness, from now on.)
So, I ask again, has specialization taken away competence? Is there no room for a Renaissance man in modern society?
A person with little skill, does not really understand the subject matter/skill. This person does not realize how many things can go wrong, what is unknown, how many variables there are. They have not trained up their skill. So they have no feedback loop - and you need one to improve a skill/area of knowledge. It’s fairly natural and not really a criticism of stupid people. Rather it is an inherent quality any of us will have in some knowledge areas/skill sets we are not so good at.
Think of men in general and how hard it is for them to NOT answer a question as if they have the answer.
I think some of the learning problem are associated with the lack of awareness caused by subconscious mental blocking, call it (lack of) meta-cognition, whatever.
And the learning process becomes much easier once we know what is blocking us.
Also, critically evaluating ones own skill in given area is important in learning.
And it’s often better to underestimate ones skill than overestimate, because we would make more effort in becoming better.
So, I guess it’s probably normal for very skilled person to have the tendency to underestimate own level, from this point of view, too.
As for unskilled people, I guess they know they are not that good, subconsciously.
And they are possibly compensating for the fear/anxiety of being poor performer by over boosting their self-evaluation (and/or anything associated with self)
It’s just very common among many people with inferiority complex.
So, poorly skilled would not make much effort in becoming better, while already skilled people would continue to make more effort in becoming even better, widening the gap.
I saw this in many places I studied/worked.
