The same studies showing that unskilled people are more likely to be unaware of how lack of good performance also reveal that intensive training in a skill not only raised performance, but also improved participants’ ability to rate their earlier performance before the training. People began to perform better and understood that what they did before was bad. The only way to know how well you are doing a task is to also have a good idea of how to do the task well. If you don’t understand how to do a task well then you also necessarily lack an ability to realize that you can’t do it well — or to realize when others are doing it better. Quoting again from the study:
- For example, consider the ability to write grammatical English. The skills that enable one to construct a grammatical sentence are the same skills necessary to recognize a grammatical sentence, and thus are the same skills necessary to determine if a grammatical mistake has been made. In short, the same knowledge that underlies the ability to produce correct judgment is also the knowledge that underlies the ability to recognize correct judgment. To lack the former is to be deficient in the latter.
The same can be said about the other skills tested for: humor and logical reasoning. We’ve all had experiences with people who think that they are “above average” — so many regard themselves as above average that it defies descriptive statistics. Too many consider themselves superior to their peers at tasks like driving, working out finances, telling jokes, and socializing.
Those who are superior, on the other hand, tend to rate themselves as only average. They fall victim to the “false-consensus effect,” assuming that their good performance is matched by everyone else. It’s not that they don’t realize they do well, but they fail to realize that everyone else isn’t doing as well. This only changes once they become aware of the problems others have.
Ignorance and incompetence should drive people to become more knowledgeable, but actually they drive people to become overconfident, secure in the belief that they don’t need to be more knowledgeable. Ignorance really is bliss, except for those who are faced with the task of trying to explain to a person that their arguments aren’t so good after all.
As the above study shows, simply telling them this isn’t sufficient. They don’t know enough to comprehend your analysis and critique. Instead, you have to educate them in order to help them become competent — then, maybe, they will come to understand why their arguments are flawed or invalid.
One of the reasons people seem to develop this overconfidence is the lack of negative feedback. If you provide not simply that feedback, but constructive criticisms which help them learn how to do the relevant tasks well rather than poorly, then you might accomplish a great deal.
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