A friend of mine is a systems engineer who is often frustrated that people at his company don’t understand his work. His colleagues frequently describe his tasks as simple and quick, akin to "copy-pasting." In reality, most tasks involve many tedious procedures, and programs are not as flexible as human thinking. However, whenever he tries to explain the complexity of his work, his audience dismisses it, admitting their lack of understanding, and similar incidents keep happening.

I believe this issue isn’t limited to the IT department; it happens across various fields. In psychology, this can be explained by the Dunning-Kruger effect, named after social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger who discovered it. They found that individuals with lower ability in a certain domain often overestimate their competence, a phenomenon captured by comparing students' self-assessed scores with their actual test results. This effect highlights a lack of awareness about one’s own "incompetence."

Other People's Work Always Seems Easier

There is a saying in Cantonese, “knows a little, pretends to know a lot,” referring to those who understand only the surface of a topic yet act as experts. This reflects a common occurrence. When we think someone else's job is easy, unless we have deep knowledge of that job, we might be experiencing the Dunning-Kruger effect.

We often learn through experience and apply similar successful strategies to new tasks. This approach allows us to handle different matters without having to experience everything firsthand. This success model becomes our thinking framework, but it doesn’t always apply to every situation. For example, a successful lawyer might have excellent logic that could be useful in medicine, but we wouldn’t consider the lawyer a medical expert. The Dunning-Kruger effect tells us that our ability to recognize our own ignorance is low. Socrates famously acknowledged his own ignorance, which made him the wisest man in Athens.

When discussing the Dunning-Kruger effect, the Imposter Syndrome is often mentioned. Opposite to the Dunning-Kruger effect, Imposter Syndrome occurs when capable people underestimate their abilities, attributing their success to luck rather than competence, and feel like frauds. Although this also involves misjudging one’s abilities, it tends to cause less harm in the workplace and won't be detailed here.

Awareness is the Starting Point

To understand our abilities, we can refer to the psychological model of the Four Stages of Competence. These stages are: "unconscious incompetence," "conscious incompetence," "conscious competence," and "unconscious competence." For abilities we lack, we often start at "unconscious incompetence," where we have only a vague concept of the skill and might intuitively judge our capability incorrectly, which is where the Dunning-Kruger effect arises.

To prevent the Dunning-Kruger effect in ourselves, we need to consciously acknowledge what we don’t know. Through this reflection, we can gradually establish our circle of competence, clearly understanding our abilities, recognizing what we need to learn, and so on.

In summary, confidence is a good thing that helps us better navigate our path, but behind confidence, we must ensure that its source is objective self-awareness, not ignorance.

Simon So

Chief Experience Officer of Hantec Group