The Illusion of Competence
The very knowledge and skills necessary to be good at a task are the same qualities that a person needs to recognize that they are not good at that task. So if a person lacks those abilities, they remain not only bad at that task but ignorant of their inability.
— Pennycook G, Ross RM, Koehler DJ, Fugelsang JA. Dunning–Kruger effects in reasoning: Theoretical implications of the failure to recognize incompetence.
Have you ever just learned something and felt a sense of satisfaction with how much you know? It’s a feeling of confidence in your new ability that doesn’t take into account how shallow your knowledge in that field is — it’s the illusion of competence.
This concept was studied as a cognitive bias called the Dunning–Kruger effect, “in which people with limited competence in a particular domain overestimate their abilities”. When you stop learning after grasping only a small aspect of a subject, you develop a false sense of mastery.
Stage 1 — high confidence driven by a false sense of mastery.
Stage 2 — lowered confidence and reduced motivation as we keep studying and realize things are more complex than we thought
Stage 3 + 4 — further lowered confidence, as we see how much more there is to learn
Stage 5 — regained confidence as we better understand the concepts
Stage 6 — full of knowledge, and almost as confident in our ability as we were in the beginning
From a Sprouts video on The Dunning-Kruger effect.
For me, this is important because I believe in the toil of sitting with topics or problems to build expertise, and I want to be an active practitioner of it. However, the tendency of human beings is to take the path of least cognitive effort when confronted with challenges, so we usually respond lazily to such situations by saying the first thing that comes to mind. And this comes from not having built a deep understanding of the subject matter. This is actually more common than we might realize (see an example from a 2016 study, here.
So what does this mean for you? I think there are specific self-developmental reasons to avoid the illusion of competence. Here’s three of them:
- It strips you of a desire to pursue the knowledge required to become an expert. Your surface-level knowledge might be enough to help you get through small-talk and look smart amongst others, but it’ll only take you so far.
- You’ll undermine the effort it takes to become an expert. This means that you’ll likely take for granted experts who are ‘walking resources’ to help you deepen your knowledge on the topic or domain in question.
- You’ll never give your self the chance to cultivate a passion in something. By moving on after learning a few concepts in a domain, you are reducing the possibility of building a deep interest in anything. Like I always say, you are only able to build a deep knowledge and appreciation of a topic because you’ve sat with it for so long.
And so here’s the bottomline. Learn to get comfortable with saying “I don’t know”, but don’t stop there. Go and learn what you don’t know. Learn it passionately and learn it vigorously until you can explain it clearly.
