Incompetence and the Failure of Feedback

One puzzling aspect of our results is how the incompetent fail, through life experience, to learn that they are unskilled.

This is not a new puzzle.

Sullivan, in 1953, marveled at “the failure of learning which has left their capacity for self-centered delusions unaffected by a life-long history of educative events” (p. 80).

Our student participants overestimated their standing on academically oriented tests as grammar and logical reasoning.

Our analysis suggests that the incompetent are unable to spot their poor performances themselves.

But one would have thought that they would have gotten negative feedback at some point in their academic career.

So why had they not learned?

1. People seldom accept negative feedback about their skills and abilities from others.

2. The bungled robbery attempt of McArthur Wheeler have some tasks and settings precluding him from receiving self-correcting information.

3. Even if people receive negative feedback, they still must come to an accurate understanding of why that failure has occurred.

The problem with failure is that it is subject to more attributional ambiguity than success.

For success to occur, many things must go right:

• The person must be skilled
• apply effort
• get lucky

For failure to occur, the lack of any one of these components is sufficient.

Because of this, even if people receive feedback that points to a lack of skill, they may attribute it to some other factor (Snyder, Higgins, & Stucky, 1983; Snyder, Shenkel, & Lowery, 1977).

Study 3 showed that the incompetent are unable to take full advantage of social comparison feedback.

People learn their own competence by watching others (Festinger, 1954; Gilbert, Giesler & Morris, 1995).

In a perfect world, everyone could see the judgments and decisions of others.

• They would accurately assess how competent those decisions are
• They would then revise their view of their own competence by comparison.

However, Study 3 showed that incompetent individuals are unable to do so.

Compared with their more expert peers, they were less able to spot competence when they saw it, and as a consequence, were less able to learn that their ability estimates were incorrect.

7 These data are based on the absolute miscalibration (regardless of sign) in participants’ estimates across the three studies in which both comparative and objective measures of perceived performance were assessed (Studies 2, 3, and 4).

Limitations of the Present Analysis

We do not mean that:

• people are always unaware of their incompetence.
• the metacognitive failings of the incompetent are the only reason people overestimate their abilities

Other factors such as motivational biases, self-serving trait definitions, selective recall of past behavior, and the tendency to ignore the proficiencies of others (Klar, Medding, & Sarel, 1996; Kruger, 1999) also play a role.

Bottom-quartile participants accounted for the bulk of the above-average effects observed in our studies (overestimating their ability by an average of 50 percentile points), there was also a slight tendency for the other quartiles to overestimate themselves (by just over 6 percentile points)-a fact our metacognitive analysis cannot explain.

When can the incompetent be expected to overestimate themselves because of their lack of skill? Although our data do not speak to this issue directly, we believe the answer depends on the domain under consideration. Some domains, like those examined in this article, are those in which knowledge about the domain confers competence in the domain. Individuals with a great understanding of the rules of grammar or inferential logic, for example, are by definition skilled linguists and logicians. In such domains, lack of skill implies both the inability to perform competently as well as the inability to recognize competence, and thus are also the domains in which the incompetent are likely to be unaware of their lack of skill.

In other domains, however, competence is not wholly dependent on knowledge or wisdom, but depends on other factors, such as physical skill. One need not look far to find individuals with an impressive understanding of the strategies and techniques of basketball, for instance, yet who could not “dunk” to save their lives. (These people are called coaches.) Similarly, art appraisers make a living evaluating fine calligraphy, but know they do not possess the steady hand and patient nature necessary to produce the work themselves. In such domains, those in which knowledge about the domain does not necessarily translate into competence in the domain, one can become acutely-even painfully-aware of the limits of one’s ability. In golf, for instance, one can know all about the fine points of course management, club selection, and effective “swing thoughts,” but one’s incompetence will become sorely obvious when, after watching one’s more able partner drive the ball 250 yards down the fairway, one proceeds to hit one’s own ball 150 yards down the fairway, 50 yards to the right, and onto the hood of that 1993 Ford Taurus.

Finally, in order for the incompetent to overestimate themselves, they must satisfy a minimal threshold of knowledge, theory, or experience that suggests to themselves that they can generate correct answers. In some domains, there are clear and unavoidable reality constraints that prohibits this notion. For example, most people have no trouble identifying their inability to translate Slovenian proverbs, reconstruct an 8-cylinder engine, or diagnose acute disseminated encephalomyelitis. In these domains, without even an intuition of how to respond, people do not overestimate their ability. Instead, if people show any bias at all, it is to rate themselves as worse than their peers (Kruger, 1999).

Relation to Work on Overconfidence

The finding that people systematically overestimate their ability and performance calls to mind other work on calibration in which people make a prediction and estimate the likelihood that the prediction will prove correct. Consistently, the confidence with which people make their predictions far exceeds their accuracy rates (e.g., Dunning, Griffin, Milojkovic, & Ross, 1990; Vallone, Griffin, Lin, & Ross, 1990; Lichtenstein, Fischhoff, & Phillips, 1982).

Our data both complement and extend this work. In particular, work on overconfidence has shown that people are more miscalibrated when they face difficult tasks, ones for which they fail to possess the requisite knowledge, than they are for easy tasks, ones for which they do possess that knowledge (Lichtenstein & Fischhoff, 1977). Our work replicates this point not by looking at properties of the task but at properties of the person. Whether the task is difficult because of the nature of the task or because the person is unskilled, the end result is a large degree of overconfidence.

Our data also provide an empirical rebuttal to a critique that has been leveled at past work on overconfidence. Gigerenzer (1991) and his colleagues (Gigerenzer, Hoffrage, & KleinbOlting, 1991) have argued that the types of probability estimates used in traditional overconfidence work-namely, those concerning the occurrence of single events-are fundamentally flawed. According to the critique, probabilities do not apply to single events but only to multiple ones. As a consequence, if people make probability estimates in more appropriate contexts (such as by estimating the total number of test items answered correctly), “cognitive illusions” such as overconfidence disappear. Our results call this critique into question. Across the three studies in which we have relevant data, participants consistently overestimated the number of items they had answered correctly, Z = 4.94, p < .0001.

Concluding Remarks

In sum, we present this article as an exploration into why people tend to hold overly optimistic and miscalibrated views about themselves. We propose that those with limited knowledge in a domain suffer a dual burden: Not only do they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, but their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. Although we feel we have done a competent job in making a strong case for this analysis, studying it empirically, and drawing out relevant implications, our thesis leaves us with one haunting worry that we cannot vanquish. That worry is that this article may contain faulty logic, methodological errors, or poor communication. Let us assure our readers that to the extent this article is imperfect, it is not a sin we have committed knowingly.