541 words

You often hear the famous phrase "you learn something new every day," right?

Well, what if I told you that your mind warps new ideas to fit with your older beliefs?

Now, don't get me wrong, you are learning new things every day that help shape you as a person.

Sometimes you feel confident in these new things you've learned; however, we can't avoid sometimes falling under the Dunning-Kruger effect,

a cognitive bias.

Not sure what this is? Well, the Dunning-Kruger effect is when people with very little knowledge on a topic

tend to significantly overestimate themselves; while, more intelligent people underestimate their knowledge.

As an example, have you ever walked into a classroom the day of an exam with an unprecedented sense of confidence,

Despite not having studied a lot the night before? or perhaps you were just the opposite. You studied all night long,

But upon sitting down to take the test, suddenly you feel as if there were things you might have forgotten to review.

Late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel's "Lie Witness" news segments further exemplify this...

The segment consists of a crew asking random Pedestrians questions that have false premises placed in. for example,

Asking people their opinion on a band that doesn't exist.

The lengths to which some people go describing how much they love that band, that doesn't really exist, is breathtaking.

That's just one example of the dunning-kruger effect set in motion.

It makes sense if you think about it. No one wants to appear clueless about something they claim to enjoy in front of a camera.

And the confidence we pull out to make us seem knowledgeable on something we know very little about can be very convincing, even to ourselves.

It's easy for our brains to say I understand this based on the clutter of meaningless information stored in our head.

The connections made in our mind sometimes even managed to fool ourselves into not recognizing our own ignorance.

This meaningless information can often consist of misconceptions that we've gained over time.

These misconceptions never really leave us -- even if we know they're wrong.

In fact, we can often bend, or outright forget, new information to make it fit with previous information.

So how do we recognize, and more importantly, avoid falling into the dunning-kruger effect?

Well, we should all strive to educate ourselves as much as possible.

After all it isn't a bad thing to learn theories and ideas.

Theory will only take you so far though, and testing things in a controlled environment isn't always possible.

This means you won't always be 100% prepared for situations you might think you learned how to deal with.

And that's ok, you aren't expected to know everything...

After just learning the basics. In fact, you're encouraged to keep learning,

To keep questioning, and to consider how your own thinking can be flawed, or misguided.

Coming to terms with the things we don't understand is the first step towards clearing up misunderstandings, and learning new things.

As Socrates said, "True wisdom comes to each of us when we realize how little we understand about life,"

"Ourselves, and the world around us." Thank you for watching, and don't forget to subscribe to Psych2Go

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One more thing:

-----WIkipedia

The Dunning–Kruger effect

?is a hypothetical cognitive bias stating that people with low ability at a task

?overestimate their own ability, and that people with high ability at a task

?underestimate their own ability.

As

?described by social psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger, the bias results from an internal illusion in people of low ability and from an external misperception in people of high ability;

?that

?is, "the miscalibration of the incompetent stems from an error about the self, whereas the miscalibration of the highly competent stems from an error about others".

It

?is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and

?comes from people's inability to

?recognize their lack of ability. Without the self-awareness of metacognition, people

?cannot objectively

?evaluate their level of competence.

The effect, or Dunning and Kruger's original explanation for the effect,

?has been challenged by mathematical analyses and comparisons across cultures.

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