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I really like the Dunning-Kruger effect. Not the real Dunning-Kruger effect, but the one that’s most portrayed in popular culture. This interpretation of the Dunning-Kruger effect describes the path of learning of a typical “know-nothing”, who, shortly on being introduced to a field of knowledge, assumes he has become an expert, and is insufferable (and wrong) until he learns enough to realize how little he actually knows. 

The real Dunning-Kruger effect is reported in the experiments they published in their 1999 paper, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”, J. Personality and Social Psychology 77 (6): 1121.

I believe that the experiments, for which Justin Kruger and David Dunning were awarded an Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology in 2000, actually point to a slightly different interpretation. This graph shows one of the results of one of their experiments, plotting perceived and measured skill at a specific task.

This graph says to me that most people in this study thought they knew about as much as the average person person participating in that study, or maybe a bit more (or maybe, since the measure in question is about skill relative to a group, that most people thought that other people in the field knew as much as they did, or almost.). As one becomes more knowledgeable in the field, one’s self assessment becomes more accurate and more positive, and strays further from the population median. 

The interpretation seems supported by the experiments, and by common experience. But it just doesn’t tell as good a story as the first interpretation, and I’m convinced that that is why the first Dunning-Kruger curve predominates the online popular discussion. 

Why is the first story better? 

Joseph Campbell knew the answer, and he explained it to Bill Moyers, and the rest of us, in a 1988 PBS documentary series, The Power of Myth. The conversations between the two seem dated now–back then, the cultural touchstones were the Star Wars and Rambo movies, LSD and peyote were still controversial drugs, and the Vietnam War and even the assassination of Kennedy were still in the common living memory. But as Joseph Campbell would be the first to point out, the myths of the human condition transcend differences of region and era.

The TV series’s companion book, also called The Power of Myth, is still interesting reading today for the revelation (or reminder, depending on your age) of what contemporary views on myth, religion, and their role in American culture were thirty years ago, long before 9/11 placed culture and religion on a war footing that we’re still struggling with.

Here’s a brief snippet.

I believe the first interpretation of the Dunning-Kruger effect better resonates with a myth that has been told countless times over the centuries in a thousand variations. I’ll retell the myth in the variation that I learned–the federal employee version:

A career federal employee has worked hard for years to master his or her field, and is now a well-respected expert. Then one day an obnoxious political appointee or elected official comes in, and thinks he knows best what the agency should be doing and how it should do it. But he doesn’t really know, and he messes it all up. The myth has two alternate endings: 

(a) the career professional comes in and saves the day; 

or the more common ending, 

(b) everything is ruined, and the career professional has the bitter satisfaction of knowing what evil might have been averted, and what good accomplished, if only someone had listened to him or her. 

The myth doesn’t necessarily require that the jackass political appointee get his public comeuppance, or ever see how wrong he was. It’s sufficient that the career professional, the real hero of the myth, sees it. The wise man knows the fool is a fool, even if the fool doesn’t. I call this story the Myth of Comeuppance.

Note 1. Please note that I am speaking here of universal archetypes, not my own experience, at least not recently. I would have to go back many years and several jobs to find a time when this particular myth resonated personally with me. 

Note 2. I wanted to call my myth “The jackass effect”, but that’s taken: Dr Lawrence Rubin describes the jackass effect in the Psychology Today blog as the increase in self-destructive or just plain stupid behavior for thrills or laughs brought on by the Jackass movies.

Thanks!
Dorn
7/5/19