June 6, 2024
June 6, 2024
Maria is in her first semester at college, sitting in her History class and taking her first college-level exam. It's an experience of many firsts for her. Just a few months before, Maria was a high school student with an impressive 4.0 GPA. Even while taking all advanced placement classes, she still managed to lead her softball team to victory that season. There's no doubt that Maria is a top student: she’s smart, she’s prepared, and worst of all, she knows it.¹
So, it is with surprise that the following week, when she opens up her laptop, Maria is shocked to realize that she scored in the bottom fifth percentile of the class. This must be a mistake, but in fact, it is not. Maria overestimated her ability and fell victim to the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Essentially, it’s the idea that unskilled individuals are often more likely to overestimate their abilities, and when they do, they are far more likely to be unaware of it.
Hold on, if Maria was such a good student in high school, maybe she just needed to study more. After all, it was her first college-level exam. Even if this is true, the point is that Maria is unaware of her shortcomings. She relied on something that many of us often and wrongly use as a heuristic—intuition. Intuition plays an important role for experts with a holistic and deep understanding of a field, but it doesn’t help a new student who has been thrown into a new situation with various new stimuli jumping at her from every direction. Intuition may have worked for Maria in high school, but college is not high school. The solution is what I call Assumption Heuristics. It is a framework we can use to acknowledge our learning gaps within a subject, area, or skill by simply assuming we possess these gaps in the first place. This framework can help us foster self-reflection, develop a growth mindset, and provide us with humility through ignorance.
Self-Reflection
Maria had no context of what a college-level exam would be like, so she had no knowledge of what to expect. However, because of her prior high school experience, where she excelled, she believed that her expertise in high school must surely translate over to college. While this is not entirely wrong, it’s based on faulty reasoning and neglects self-reflection.
This is the same reason why college acceptance to top universities is so tough. Prior success is not indicative of future success. The better approach, at least for students, is to self-reflect. Self-reflection is predicated on metacognition, which is a fancy word for thinking about thinking. In Maria's case, we can learn the most by understanding metacognition as the self-reflecting assurance that guarantees we’re learning.² Maria can use self-reflection first by generating an assumption based on the context. For example, the context is a new environment. Maria is unaware of what the test experience will be like. She’s never taken college-level exams, so for all she knows, they could be harder or easier. The difficulty or lack of difficulty of the exams doesn’t help Maria, because an exam can be difficult yet still passable, and likewise, an exam can be easy but if we fail to study or just study the wrong material, we can still fail. It is important that our self-reflection falls back on contextualizing the scenario.
Maria’s best course of action is to seek information that she does not have. She needs to accept that she’s missing pieces to the puzzle, and she would have been aware of this had she self-reflected. Once she goes through the process of self-reflection, she will be able to implement the correct actions. Maybe Maria spent her time focusing on the textbook or class readings, but had she gone over the syllabus or talked to a student who was familiar with the professor’s style, she would’ve known that the professor derives most of his test questions from the PowerPoint slides while the textbook and class readings will be the focus of the term paper.
The main point here is that before Maria can adequately assess what she needs to do, she has to self-reflect in order to eventually gain enough context to know where to put her effort.
Not only is self-reflection an optimal assessment of ourselves and the world around us, but it also opens us up to the development of a growth mindset. When we find ourselves in a new situation, whether it’s a new job, new school, new video game, etc., we must self-reflect with this simple question: What is the context? And when we do this, we transform ourselves into the solution-driven learners that we’re meant to be, allowing for the malleability of our brain.
Growth Mindset
When we ignore context, we leave ourselves susceptible to intellectual stagnation. It’s a hard thing to overcome because we may not even be conscious of our fixed mindset. A fixed mindset is the belief that we don’t have much control over our skills and abilities. It’s the idea that we’ve been dealt a hand and that’s it. Either it’s good or bad, but the point is we can’t change the cards we’ve been dealt. Luckily, poker is not life, and of course, we can change the cards. We do it often. Am I calling for a dream where we can all be professional athletes, admired celebrities, or mega-yacht-owning billionaires? Of course not. Instead, I am calling for a reality in which we can all continuously improve.
According to Carol Dweck and Lisa Sorich in “Mastery-Oriented Thinking,” hard work and motivation are often the result of mastery-oriented coping, which is the simple idea of perseverance even in the face of failure. Dweck and Sorich found that praising achievements promotes the opposite—laziness and complacency. The ability of a student to take on failure with a sense of focus and effectiveness is, in essence, a growth mindset. In other words, when students view failure as a learning experience and persevere, they are accepting that intelligence is malleable.³ When a student receives praise, even when well-deserved, such as after passing an exam, it can lead them to regress into a pattern of helplessness. The problem with praise is that it acknowledges the learner’s accomplishment but not their effort. Consider where empty praise, such as participation awards, may lead, and what we could gain in a world where we praise effort over achievement. Once we convince ourselves that intelligence is malleable, we can begin to search for the things that will allow us to manipulate it, such as feedback.
Ignorance as a Means to Intellectual Humility
Part of the process of learning is being comfortable with vulnerability. This kind of vulnerability, especially when it comes to knowledge work, is the acceptance of intellectual humility. Accepting is easy; implementation can be a problem. Let us use Maria as an example once more. It’s her first year, she’s in a new situation, she’s coming from a world of achievements, and now, we are asking her to open herself up to possible ridicule. Of course, we know it’s not ridiculous to acknowledge our lack of knowledge, but for many students or new employees who have gone through the process of accomplishment, it’s like asking them to fail. In a system where failure is looked down upon and accomplishments praised, our ability to be vulnerable diminishes.
In Plato’s Apology, Socrates is brought to trial and charged with blasphemy and the corruption of the youth. During his defense, Socrates retells the story of where this slander began. According to Socrates, it was the Oracle of Delphi who claimed that there was no one wiser than Socrates. So Socrates ventured to test whether he indeed was the wisest, and in Socratic fashion, he cross-examined the wisest men he could find. Socrates concluded that he was indeed wise, not because he was far more knowledgeable than those he cross-examined, but because he was far more conscious of his ignorance than those he challenged.
Socrates never claimed to know what he didn’t know, as he often found with those he challenged, and so by that reasoning—a reasoning based on accepting one’s ignorance—is what makes someone wise. Socrates states, “At any rate, it seems that I’m wiser than he in just this one small way: that what I don’t know, I don’t think I know.”⁴ To be wise is to accept one’s ignorance, not as a sign of weakness but as a means of intellectual humility. For an empty flower pot yet to be filled with nourishing soil is better than one filled with cement.
We’ve all been in a situation where we’re tasked with something, and maybe we didn’t completely get all the instructions. Out of fear of coming off as incompetent by asking follow-up questions, we go about accomplishing the task with gaps in our knowledge, truly seeming at best incompetent. We may see it as a sign of weakness, and maybe we ought to do more in our culture to remedy it, but for now, we have to take it upon ourselves to risk the embarrassment and ask the questions no matter how annoying we may seem. Eventually, you will ask enough questions that they’ll seek you out for answers.
Conclusion
The Dunning-Kruger effect lurks in the shadows where we can neither know nor see its effects until it’s too late. Fortunately, we can use assumption heuristics to ensure we don’t succumb to its detrimental effects. The assumption heuristics building blocks are self-reflection, growth mindset, and feedback. Self-reflection helps us gain a broader view of our situation. It is a form of metacognition that we can use to open ourselves up to a growth mindset. This is the second framework. A growth mindset is understanding that we have to be uncomfortable at times. We also have to be wary of accomplishment praise that often leads to accomplishment entitlement. Instead, our praise ought to come from the effort we’re putting into our work. Finally, the last part of the equation is to realize that the point of knowledge is not to know more than the next person, but to accept it in abundance. Socrates taught us that wisdom is not a measurement of knowledge but the virtue of knowing that there is always more to learn. Next time we find ourselves in a new situation, we need to stop, reflect, assess, try, fail, ask for help, and not give up. More importantly, we need to assume that we don't know, and that’s okay because we can always learn.
Bibliography
________
David Dunning and Justin Kruger, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77, no. 3(1999): 1121-1134. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121-1134, 1121.
Flavell, John H. “Metacognition and Cognitive Monitoring A New Area of Cognitive-Developmental Inquiry.” American Psychologist, 34, no. 10 (1979): 906-911. DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.34.10.906, 906.
Carol S. Dweck & Lisa A. Sorich. “Mastery-Oriented Thinking,” in Coping: The Psychology of What Works, ed. Charles R. Snyder (Oxford University Press 1999), 233-34.
Plato, “Apology,” trans. C. D. C. Reeve, in Introductory Readings in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy, 2nd ed., eds. C. D. C. Reeve and Patrick Lee Miller (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2015), 65-6.
Maria is in her first semester at college, sitting in her History class and taking her first college-level exam. It's an experience of many firsts for her. Just a few months before, Maria was a high school student with an impressive 4.0 GPA. Even while taking all advanced placement classes, she still managed to lead her softball team to victory that season. There's no doubt that Maria is a top student: she’s smart, she’s prepared, and worst of all, she knows it.¹
So, it is with surprise that the following week, when she opens up her laptop, Maria is shocked to realize that she scored in the bottom fifth percentile of the class. This must be a mistake, but in fact, it is not. Maria overestimated her ability and fell victim to the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Essentially, it’s the idea that unskilled individuals are often more likely to overestimate their abilities, and when they do, they are far more likely to be unaware of it.
Hold on, if Maria was such a good student in high school, maybe she just needed to study more. After all, it was her first college-level exam. Even if this is true, the point is that Maria is unaware of her shortcomings. She relied on something that many of us often and wrongly use as a heuristic—intuition. Intuition plays an important role for experts with a holistic and deep understanding of a field, but it doesn’t help a new student who has been thrown into a new situation with various new stimuli jumping at her from every direction. Intuition may have worked for Maria in high school, but college is not high school. The solution is what I call Assumption Heuristics. It is a framework we can use to acknowledge our learning gaps within a subject, area, or skill by simply assuming we possess these gaps in the first place. This framework can help us foster self-reflection, develop a growth mindset, and provide us with humility through ignorance.
Self-Reflection
Maria had no context of what a college-level exam would be like, so she had no knowledge of what to expect. However, because of her prior high school experience, where she excelled, she believed that her expertise in high school must surely translate over to college. While this is not entirely wrong, it’s based on faulty reasoning and neglects self-reflection.
This is the same reason why college acceptance to top universities is so tough. Prior success is not indicative of future success. The better approach, at least for students, is to self-reflect. Self-reflection is predicated on metacognition, which is a fancy word for thinking about thinking. In Maria's case, we can learn the most by understanding metacognition as the self-reflecting assurance that guarantees we’re learning.² Maria can use self-reflection first by generating an assumption based on the context. For example, the context is a new environment. Maria is unaware of what the test experience will be like. She’s never taken college-level exams, so for all she knows, they could be harder or easier. The difficulty or lack of difficulty of the exams doesn’t help Maria, because an exam can be difficult yet still passable, and likewise, an exam can be easy but if we fail to study or just study the wrong material, we can still fail. It is important that our self-reflection falls back on contextualizing the scenario.
Maria’s best course of action is to seek information that she does not have. She needs to accept that she’s missing pieces to the puzzle, and she would have been aware of this had she self-reflected. Once she goes through the process of self-reflection, she will be able to implement the correct actions. Maybe Maria spent her time focusing on the textbook or class readings, but had she gone over the syllabus or talked to a student who was familiar with the professor’s style, she would’ve known that the professor derives most of his test questions from the PowerPoint slides while the textbook and class readings will be the focus of the term paper.
The main point here is that before Maria can adequately assess what she needs to do, she has to self-reflect in order to eventually gain enough context to know where to put her effort.
Not only is self-reflection an optimal assessment of ourselves and the world around us, but it also opens us up to the development of a growth mindset. When we find ourselves in a new situation, whether it’s a new job, new school, new video game, etc., we must self-reflect with this simple question: What is the context? And when we do this, we transform ourselves into the solution-driven learners that we’re meant to be, allowing for the malleability of our brain.
Growth Mindset
When we ignore context, we leave ourselves susceptible to intellectual stagnation. It’s a hard thing to overcome because we may not even be conscious of our fixed mindset. A fixed mindset is the belief that we don’t have much control over our skills and abilities. It’s the idea that we’ve been dealt a hand and that’s it. Either it’s good or bad, but the point is we can’t change the cards we’ve been dealt. Luckily, poker is not life, and of course, we can change the cards. We do it often. Am I calling for a dream where we can all be professional athletes, admired celebrities, or mega-yacht-owning billionaires? Of course not. Instead, I am calling for a reality in which we can all continuously improve.
According to Carol Dweck and Lisa Sorich in “Mastery-Oriented Thinking,” hard work and motivation are often the result of mastery-oriented coping, which is the simple idea of perseverance even in the face of failure. Dweck and Sorich found that praising achievements promotes the opposite—laziness and complacency. The ability of a student to take on failure with a sense of focus and effectiveness is, in essence, a growth mindset. In other words, when students view failure as a learning experience and persevere, they are accepting that intelligence is malleable.³ When a student receives praise, even when well-deserved, such as after passing an exam, it can lead them to regress into a pattern of helplessness. The problem with praise is that it acknowledges the learner’s accomplishment but not their effort. Consider where empty praise, such as participation awards, may lead, and what we could gain in a world where we praise effort over achievement. Once we convince ourselves that intelligence is malleable, we can begin to search for the things that will allow us to manipulate it, such as feedback.
Ignorance as a Means to Intellectual Humility
Part of the process of learning is being comfortable with vulnerability. This kind of vulnerability, especially when it comes to knowledge work, is the acceptance of intellectual humility. Accepting is easy; implementation can be a problem. Let us use Maria as an example once more. It’s her first year, she’s in a new situation, she’s coming from a world of achievements, and now, we are asking her to open herself up to possible ridicule. Of course, we know it’s not ridiculous to acknowledge our lack of knowledge, but for many students or new employees who have gone through the process of accomplishment, it’s like asking them to fail. In a system where failure is looked down upon and accomplishments praised, our ability to be vulnerable diminishes.
In Plato’s Apology, Socrates is brought to trial and charged with blasphemy and the corruption of the youth. During his defense, Socrates retells the story of where this slander began. According to Socrates, it was the Oracle of Delphi who claimed that there was no one wiser than Socrates. So Socrates ventured to test whether he indeed was the wisest, and in Socratic fashion, he cross-examined the wisest men he could find. Socrates concluded that he was indeed wise, not because he was far more knowledgeable than those he cross-examined, but because he was far more conscious of his ignorance than those he challenged.
Socrates never claimed to know what he didn’t know, as he often found with those he challenged, and so by that reasoning—a reasoning based on accepting one’s ignorance—is what makes someone wise. Socrates states, “At any rate, it seems that I’m wiser than he in just this one small way: that what I don’t know, I don’t think I know.”⁴ To be wise is to accept one’s ignorance, not as a sign of weakness but as a means of intellectual humility. For an empty flower pot yet to be filled with nourishing soil is better than one filled with cement.
We’ve all been in a situation where we’re tasked with something, and maybe we didn’t completely get all the instructions. Out of fear of coming off as incompetent by asking follow-up questions, we go about accomplishing the task with gaps in our knowledge, truly seeming at best incompetent. We may see it as a sign of weakness, and maybe we ought to do more in our culture to remedy it, but for now, we have to take it upon ourselves to risk the embarrassment and ask the questions no matter how annoying we may seem. Eventually, you will ask enough questions that they’ll seek you out for answers.
Conclusion
The Dunning-Kruger effect lurks in the shadows where we can neither know nor see its effects until it’s too late. Fortunately, we can use assumption heuristics to ensure we don’t succumb to its detrimental effects. The assumption heuristics building blocks are self-reflection, growth mindset, and feedback. Self-reflection helps us gain a broader view of our situation. It is a form of metacognition that we can use to open ourselves up to a growth mindset. This is the second framework. A growth mindset is understanding that we have to be uncomfortable at times. We also have to be wary of accomplishment praise that often leads to accomplishment entitlement. Instead, our praise ought to come from the effort we’re putting into our work. Finally, the last part of the equation is to realize that the point of knowledge is not to know more than the next person, but to accept it in abundance. Socrates taught us that wisdom is not a measurement of knowledge but the virtue of knowing that there is always more to learn. Next time we find ourselves in a new situation, we need to stop, reflect, assess, try, fail, ask for help, and not give up. More importantly, we need to assume that we don't know, and that’s okay because we can always learn.
Bibliography
________
David Dunning and Justin Kruger, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 77, no. 3(1999): 1121-1134. DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121-1134, 1121.
Flavell, John H. “Metacognition and Cognitive Monitoring A New Area of Cognitive-Developmental Inquiry.” American Psychologist, 34, no. 10 (1979): 906-911. DOI: 10.1037/0003-066X.34.10.906, 906.
Carol S. Dweck & Lisa A. Sorich. “Mastery-Oriented Thinking,” in Coping: The Psychology of What Works, ed. Charles R. Snyder (Oxford University Press 1999), 233-34.
Plato, “Apology,” trans. C. D. C. Reeve, in Introductory Readings in Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy, 2nd ed., eds. C. D. C. Reeve and Patrick Lee Miller (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2015), 65-6.
