Unskilled and Unaware of It

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains.

We suggest that this overestimation occurs partly because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden:

1. They reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices.

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.

Their test scores put them in the 12th percentile. But 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.

Such incompetent people are incapable of knowing that they are incompetent.

To have such knowledge would already be to remedy a good portion of the offense.

In 1995, McArthur Wheeler walked into 2 Pittsburgh banks and robbed them in broad daylight, with no attempt at disguise.

He was arrested later that night, less than 1 hour after videotapes of him taken from surveillance cameras were broadcast on the 11 o’clock news.

When police later showed him the surveillance tapes, Mr. Wheeler stared in incredulity. “But I wore the juice,” he mumbled.

Apparently, Mr. Wheeler thought that rubbing one’s face with lemon juice rendered it invisible to videotape cameras (Fuocco, 1996).

We bring up the unfortunate affairs of Mr. Wheeler to make 3 points.

1. Success and satisfaction depend on knowledge, wisdom, or savvy in knowing which rules to follow and which strategies to pursue.

2. People differ widely in the knowledge and strategies they apply in these domains with varying levels of success.

Some are competent, others are not.

3. When people are incompetent in the strategies they adopt to achieve success and satisfaction, they suffer a dual burden:

• They reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices
• Their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it

Instead, like Mr. Wheeler, they are left with the mistaken impression that they are doing just fine.

Charles Darwin (1871) sagely noted: over a century ago: ‘‘ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge" (p. 3).

We argue that the skills that engender competence in a domain are often the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that domain-one’s own or anyone else’s.

Because of this, incompetent individuals lack:

• “metacognition”

• “metamemory”

• metacomprehension

• self-monitoring skills

These terms refer to the ability to know how well one is performing, when one is likely to be accurate in judgment, and when one is likely to be in error.

An example is the ability to write grammatical English.

Grammar skills are needed to:

• write and understand a grammatical sentence.
• point out grammatical mistakes

The knowledge that leads to correct judgment is the sane knowledge to expose wrong judgement.