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One day in 1995, a large, heavy middle-aged man robbed two banks in the American city of Pittsburgh. He did it in broad daylight, without wear a mask or any sort of disguise. And he smiled at surveillance cameras before walking out of each bank. Later that night, police arrested a surprised McArthur Wheeler. When they showed him the surveillance tapes, Wheeler stared in disbelief. “But I wore the juice,” he mumbled. Apparently, Wheeler thought that rubbing lemon juice on his skin would render him invisible to videotape cameras. After all, lemon juice is used as invisible ink so, as long as he didn’t come near a heat source, he should have been completely invisible. The episode caught the eye of the psychologist David Dunning at Cornell University. He reasoned that, while almost everyone holds favorable views of their competence in various domains, some people mistakenly assess their competence as being much higher than they actually are. This “illusion of confidence” is now called the Dunning-Kruger Effect, and describes the cognitive bias to inflate self-assessment.
“I don’t know that I don’t know” is such an unsettling, ego-smashing thought. Dunning Kruger Effect is what we all suffer from. In tasks where we lack expertise, like stock market investing or economic forecasting, we often overestimate our actual knowledge. Worse, we are unable to recognize our own incompetence.
So if the Dunning Kruger effect is invisible to those experiencing it, what can you do to find out how good you actually are at various things? First, ask for feedback from other people, and consider it, even if it’s hard to hear. Second, and more important, keep learning. The more knowledgeable we become, the less likely we are to have invisible holes in our competence The trick is to not be fooled by illusions of superiority and to learn to accurately reevaluate our competence. After all, as Confucius reportedly said, real knowledge is knowing the extent of one’s ignorance