On Not Knowing Ourselves

One of the reasons people study psychology and even philosophy is because they want to know more about themselves. But it's not as easy as we first think it's going to be.

In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates says:

"But I have no leisure for them at all; and the reason, my friend, is this: I am not yet able, as the Delphic inscription has it, to know myself; so it seems to me ridiculous, when I do not yet know that, to investigate irrelevant things."

Or as Wittgenstein says:

“Nothing is so difficult as not deceiving oneself.”

OK, I can't help it. One more quote, this time from Confucius:

"Real knowledge is to know the extent of one's ignorance."

And there are a lot more quotes like this by the likes of Shakespeare, Darwin, Bertrand Russel, etc. I think I know what's going on here. Intelligent, thoughtful, and educated people run into a lot of less skilled (ok, I really mean idiots) who think they have everything figured out. So they offer some advice and, hopefully, try to live up to it themselves.

I'm sure we've all run across these kinds of people. All you have to do is read a few comments below almost any article on the Internet. How is it that such stupid people can be so blissfully unaware of their ignorance?

One aspect of knowing ourselves is understanding our abilities and limitations. How intelligent are you? How good are you at reasoning, observing, understanding others, coping with difficulties, telling jokes? These, and many more questions, require us to have some sense of our own abilities as well as some sense of the abilities of others. But it turns out that we are really bad at this. One (but there are many more) of the reason's knowing ourselves is so hard is because we often overestimate our own abilities. And this is especially true when we are most incompetent. My goal isn't to seek a way out of the cave. What I'm interested in is finding a better way of navigating this world we live in. Enter David Dunning and Justin Kruger. They have actually put these things to the test, the empirical test, that is.

You Are Not So Smart has a nice interview with David Dunning. Dunning is best known for his part in developing the Dunning-Kruger effect which goes a long way toward explaining why it's so hard to live up to the Delphic maxim.  They describe it this way in their original paper:

"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."

Or, as the abstract to another article says:

"Successful negotiation of everyday life would seem to require people to possess insight about deficiencies in their intellectual and social skills. However, people tend to be blissfully unaware of their incompetence. This lack of awareness arises because poor performers are doubly cursed: Their lack of skill deprives them not only of the ability to produce correct responses, but also of the expertise necessary to surmise that they are not producing them. People base their perceptions of performance, in part, on their preconceived notions about their skills. Because these notions often do not correlate with objective performance, they can lead people to make judgments about their performance that have little to do with actual accomplishment."

What jumps out to me from the graphs in their paper is that most people just generally see themselves as slightly above average. Most people -- on average, and no matter what their actual competence -- tend to see themselves as somewhere between 60% and 70%. I must be especially prone to the Dunning-Kruger effect since I used to see myself coming in just around 80-90% in most areas of my life. Even though I know it's impossible for me to be that good in everything. Actually, I've never seen myself as good in art, music, and language learning. In everything else I was always sure I was better than you.

The thing is, I know that this can't actually be true. So I try, in all things, to live by the Principle of Fallibility. Basically, I could be wrong. I've been wrong before. I will be wrong in the future. What's to say that I'm not wrong now. If even most published scientific studies are wrong, what could protect me from the same fate? So now I rate myself much lower in most things, especially things I don't really have proper training in. But it's still hard not to see myself as above average. It's such a hard delusion to overcome. It might be that the only way to really overcome it is to become depressed. It's called Depressive Realism, but not everyone buys into it and I'm not planning on trying it anytime soon.

Since I'm too lazy to make my own YouTube videos, I offer this nicely done explanation of the Dunning-Kruger effect:

What I like about the TheraminTrees video above is that he points out that we can do something to improve the situation:

• Training. I guess that if we could actually get out competence up to 60% then we'd have a more accurate assessment of ourselves. 
• Independent feedback. If you aren't sure what your skill level is in something, and you could find an independently graded test in that area or find some people who might be capable of telling you the truth, this might be able to help your assessment. That is, if you believe it. The problem here is that people really close to the bottom don't seem to learn much from being exposed to the truth. 
• I think this is what college really offers to students. When we read a book or even two or twenty books on a subject we feel like we have mastered the material. It's not until we take an exam or write a paper and turn it in for a grade that our self-understanding can be challenged. College forces us to face the challenge. If we are willing to listen to the feedback we can grow. 
• Publishing on the Internet can also open us up to critics that might challenge our own self assessment. It can be intimidating. I'm intimidated right now. Who knows what's going to happen after I hit the Publish button?

I would also add that developing certain intellectual virtues could help mitigate the effects. Especially

• Intellectual Humility:  Unfortunately, what I find most of the time is that what we really think is that if other people had intellectual humility they would see that I was right. This isn't the type of humility I'm talking about. For one, humility does not seek to humiliate or demonize the other. Humility is to open ourselves up to learn. There's a lot we don't know and a lot of ways in which what we think we know could be wrong. Keep that in mind next time you read a Wikipedia article. Have you also read all the references at the bottom of the page? If you haven't then how much can you really understand. The article is just the tip of the iceberg. 
• Intellectual Courage: Courage is the hardest virtue of all. It takes great courage to question our own cherished beliefs. I was looking for a YouTube video on intellectual humility and found a video by a Muslim encouraging his fellow believers to have more humility. But what he actually was espousing was not humility at all. He first accused unbelievers of vanity for getting a PhD just so they can put Dr. in front of their name, but then told his followers not to question Islamic scholars because they have studies far longer than you have. I don't know if you can see the irony in this, but it occurs to me that he doesn't have the courage to question his own beliefs and therefore humility is just abstraction with no traction in the real world. 

If you want to know more about Dunning's work go to the Self and Social Insight (SaSI) Lab.

Question: Do people who actually think they are below the fifty percentile ever start academically oriented blogs? Isn't it a requirement that you think you know more than other people if you are going to start a blog that concerns critical thinking skills and philosophical investigations?