Why we all fall victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect – BBC REEL

we all find it difficult to admit when we might be wrong in an increasingly polarized world it seems as if people are becoming more convinced of their own beliefs and less willing to contemplate other points of view but could this be to the detriment of our intelligence could having a sense of intellectual humility actually be key to making us smarter one of the new topics that's come into conversation a lot of different circles in society is the idea of intellectual humility that we should be humble in our opinions humble in our beliefs and in our

conclusions we have to know our limits and we have to tolerate those who disagree with us because they may have a kernel or more of a kernel of truth than we actually believe one way to think about intellectual humility and intelligence is that no matter how smart you are how much school you've had none of us are inoculated from getting things wrong now and then we're all intellectually fallible why do we struggle so much to understand and admit to the limits of our knowledge social media often feels like it's full of people offering confident opinions

on things they really know little about but what fuels this overconfidence and are we all susceptible to it the dunning-kruger effect is that when you lack knowledge or expertise you're not in a position to realize that you lack knowledge and expertise and the reason this happens is because often the expertise you need to come to a correct decision is exactly the same expertise you need to be able to evaluate whether or not that is the right decision one thing to recognize is that the dunning-kruger effect sooner or later is inevitable it'll happen to all of

us we all have pockets of incompetence we all make errors and those are the moments we step into the effect and don't know that we're stepping into the effect people often assume that people deny their incompetence because they're in denial they know it's there but they don't want to admit it's there either to you or to themselves actually what our work suggests is that our errors are simply invisible to us now the dunning-kruger effect is a part of the ingredient in this mix and this stew of uh intellectual humility and the need for intellectual humility

so the work that i do does suggest that we should be a little bit more intellectually humble if we truly want to know uh sometimes it means recognizing when we don't know so how does intellectual humility connect with our intelligence could it be playing a part in how we acquire knowledge or the way in which we perceive just how smart we really are we conducted five studies together to examine how intellectual humility relates to people's intelligence uh towards their knowledge as well as towards their meta knowledge so people's perceptions or awareness of how intelligent they

are or how much they know and what we saw is that there was no relationship between people's levels of intellectual humility and their general cognitive ability or their iq but even though intellectual humility wasn't predicting general intelligence or cognitive ability it was very much predictive of how people viewed their intelligence so people who were lower in intellectual humility indicated that they were much better at problem solving than other people and they also overestimated how well they had done on the cognitive ability assessment people who were higher in cognitive ability were more conservative in their assessments

of their problem-solving ability and actually underestimated a little bit how well they had done on the cognitive assessments then in another study we looked at how intellectual humility relates to people's general knowledge what we found is that intellectual humility was predictive of people's ability to discriminate between real and fictitious items on this assessment meaning that people who are more intellectually humble had more general knowledge so when people were lower in intellectual humility they were more likely to claim knowledge that they didn't have and so even though we saw in the first study that intellectual humility

wasn't related to general cognitive ability it did seem to relate to how much knowledge people possess if intellectual humility is linked to acquiring knowledge could it be a key component to making humans smarter interestingly one of the obstacles to intellectual humility can actually be the way in which we perceive and understand human intelligence on one end of the spectrum people believe that intelligence is a fixed trait that you get a certain amount of it and that's that on the other end of the spectrum people believe that intelligence is malleable that you can grow and improve

your intelligence through hard work and effort if we perceive that intelligence is something that can't grow and that we either have it or we don't it's harder for us to have intellectual humility adopting a growth mindset can help us foster intellectual humility because when we move into this idea that intelligence can be developed that we can get smarter and learn which is all part of the growth mindset it opens us up to being intellectually humble to admitting everything that we don't yet know and to correcting ways that we might have gone wrong i think intellectual

humility could have a huge impact on society and what we're seeing from the research so far is that people who are more intellectually humble have more favorable views of people who disagree with them they're more open to to negotiating and compromising they're more open to exploring information and especially information that is in conflict with what they currently believe one of the things about the dunning-kruger effect is that it arises when people are left to their own devices when they're the ones trying to judge their judgment that's when they get into trouble so the important thing

i think is also to seek out opinions of other people we may not like them but they may enlighten us if we want to make big discoveries it's going to require us to wade into the unknown and really come to grips with everything that we don't yet understand intellectual humility can help us make progress in that direction of course i believe that but i could be wrong you