“Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge” Charles Darwin.

“One of the painful things about our time is that those who feel certainty are stupid, and those with any imagination and understanding are filled with doubt and indecision.” Bertrand Russell

The quotations above highlight the topic for today’s post – how people rate their own competence and level of skill.

A friend told me about a programme she had watched the other day in which some successful women experience something called ‘imposter syndrome’ and doubt their own ability, thinking themselves to be frauds. Before I discuss imposter syndrome, I will talk about the Dunning-Kruger effect which is related in many ways.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias. A cognitive bias is a pattern of deviation in a person’s judgement about situations and other people, which may well seem illogical or irrational to others. They create their own subjective reality, distorting incoming information, which may then dictate their behaviour. The Dunning-Kruger effect can manifest itself in two different ways:

(1) Unskilled or incompetent people who fail to grasp they are inept as they lack the skill and metacognitive capacity to discriminate between competent and incompetent performance; they rate their ability much higher than it actually is. You just have to look at the opening stages of ‘X Factor’ or ‘Britain’s Got Talent’ to see what I mean! Dunning and Kruger (1999) assert “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.” Incompetent people tend to overrate their own skill level, fail to see actual skill in others, and fail to see the extreme of their inadequacy.

These people fail to comprehend their own incompetence because they are so incompetent. To overcome their incompetence they need the ability to distinguish competence from incompetence, so they get stuck in a vicious cycle. Dunning and Kruger (1999) state “The skills needed to produce logically sound arguments, for instance, are the same skills that are necessary to recognize when a logically sound argument has been made. Thus, if people lack the skills to produce correct answers, they are also cursed with an inability to know when their answers, or anyone else’s, are right or wrong. They cannot recognize their responses as mistaken, or other people’s responses as superior to their own.”

This cycle can be broken quite easily through external training in metacognition, significantly improving their ability to self-assess and laying the foundations for self-improvement. What is scarier is that we are all supposedly susceptible to it when we venture outside our own areas of expertise.

You may well recognise this effect in work colleagues who perpetually make mistakes, but are dumbfounded when remonstrated by a manager, or in students who don’t revise for tests and are then shocked when they don’t pass!

(2) At the other end of the competence spectrum, we have skilled or competent people who have low self-confidence as they may incorrectly presume others have a comparable understanding or skill level; they fail to recognise their talents as they believe others must be equally good.This manifestation of the Dunning-Kruger effect relates to the imposter syndrome, as we shall see below.

The first is an error of the self, whereas the second is an error about others.

Imposter syndrome

Imposter syndrome is a collection of feelings of inadequacy where people are unable to internalise achievements, in spite of external evidence of their competence. They experience chronic self-doubt and often think they are frauds who don’t deserve the success they have achieved. Proof of success is dismissed as luck or other external factor (anything other than their own internal attributes), or as a result of deception and ‘faking it’ – tricking others into thinking they are more intelligent and competent than they believe themselves to be. They may fear success and the responsibility and visibility that comes with it, and yet the increasing pressure to succeed so they are not ‘found out’ perpetuates this fear.

Imposter syndrome is associated with highly successful people, high achievers. It was originally noted as being particularly common among high-achieving women, although recent research points to it being equally comparable in men. Research in the 1980s estimated two out of every five successful people consider themselves frauds and around two-thirds of all people feel like impostors at some point.

An article in the Guardian sums it up nicely (http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2013/nov/09/impostor-syndrome-oliver-burkeman)