Are You Overly Confident About Yourself?

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We often have a feeling that we really do know ourselves, and we know t we're capable. But when you actually test ot what people can actually do, or what they really do, the picture isn't that positive. We don't get to see the entire range of competence out there - from the worst all the way to the best. People who feel sort of at the amateur level,. feel that they have a achieved something, and that there's not much distance between that amateur and level and master levels. A lot of people have seen it. That is that. They really haven't seen the master level.

In this episode, we explore why we are unaware that we lack the skill to tell how unskilled and unaware we are.

The evidence gathered so far by psychologists and neuroscientists seems to suggest that each one of us has a relationship with our own ignorance, a dishonest, complicated relationship, and that dishonesty keeps us sane, happy, and willing to get out of bed in the morning. Part of that ignorance is a blind spot we each possess that obscures both our competence and incompetence called the Dunning-Kruger Effect.

It's a psychological phenomenon that arises sometimes in your life because you are generally very bad at self-assessment. If you have ever been confronted with the fact that you were in over your head, or that you had no idea what you were doing, or that you thought you were more skilled at something than you actually were – then you may have experienced this effect. It is very easy to be both unskilled and unaware of it, and in this episode we explore why that is with professor David Dunning, one of the researchers who coined the term and a scientist who continues to add to our understanding of the phenomenon.

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