Being mistaken about something is not a flaw in a person’s reasoning and neither is being unskilled in constructing or analyzing logical arguments. Where a flaw does occur, however, is in the fact that the worse a person is at such tasks, the less likely they are to realize it, the more likely they are to overestimate their abilities, and the less likely they are to realize that others’ efforts are superior.
We don’t need to speculate that such a connection might exist or rely upon anecdotal experiences we ourselves have had — Justin Kruger and David Dunning at Cornell University demonstrated it in psychological studies and published their findings in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in an article entitled “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments.”
- People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.
The more incompetent a person is at a given skill, the less likely they are to realize it because they also lack the metacognitive skills necessary to evaluate their performance. The authors liken this to the neurological condition known as anosognosia. The result of damage to the right side of the brain, sufferers of anosognosia are not only paralyzed on the left side of the body, but they are also unable to realize that they are paralyzed.
When asked to pick up something with their left hand, they fail to do so and offer weak rationalizations for this failure — like not hearing the instruction or simply being too tired. These patients are not lying to researchers; instead, they lack the ability to understand what plain and obvious evidence should tell them: they can’t move their left hand or arm. If this is possible with physical situations, perhaps it also happens with purely psychological situations as well — and thus perhaps incompetence causes not only poor performance but also an inability to recognize that the performance is poor.
