Dunning-Kruger: Failing to Learn from Failure

One of the interesting findings from Kruger and Dunning’s research is that they also studied how people correct the discrepancy between their self-assessment and their actual performance.  

The authors state: “One puzzling aspect of our results is how the incompetent fail, through life experience, to learn that they are unskilled.” [1]  They go on to observe that this is not a new puzzle: that receiving negative, corrective (but constructive), feedback is something that seldom happens in everyday life.  

They also point out that people who incorrectly assess their own performance often cannot accurately judge the level of competence of others and learn from it.  They may adopt a form of attributional ambiguity where they ascribe their failure to bad luck or other outside causes but consider any successes they might have to be a result and proof of their abilities.  

The authors even enlist a diagnostic condition called anosognosia (from the Greek: a-without; nosos-disease; gnosis-knowledge) where a psychological analogue to certain types of brain damage generates an inability to recognize when one’s performance is poor.

Whenever we venture from our comfort zone into an area where we are not expert it is helpful to consider what will likely lie ahead and learn how to recognize undue and unearned overconfidence.  Ignorance is not to be feared—indeed, it can be valuable.  And failure does not need to be either paralyzing or permanent.

The only real failure is the failure to learn from failure.  As Henry Ford once said: “The only real mistake is the one from which we learn nothing.” 

And Alexander Pope lyrically articulated, only knowledge allows us to understand our level of ignorance:

 “A little learning is a dangerous thing.

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian Spring;

There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,

and drinking largely sobers us again.”

FOOTNOTES

[1] Quote from: Kruger, Justin; Dunning, David (1999). "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 (6): 1121–1134.