People can be clueless in a million different ways, even
though they are largely trying to get things right in an honest way.
Deficits in knowledge, or in information the world is giving them, just
leads people toward false beliefs and holes in their expertise...
...Psychologists over the past 50 years have demonstrated the sheer genius people have at convincing themselves of congenial conclusions while denying the truth of inconvenient ones. You can call it self-deception, but it also goes by the names rationalization, wishful thinking, defensive processing, self-delusion, and motivated reasoning. There is a robust catalogue of strategies people follow to believe what they want to, and we research psychologists are hardly done describing the shape or the size of that catalogue. All this rationalization can lead people toward false beliefs, or perhaps more commonly, to tenaciously hang on to false beliefs they should really reconsider.
Denial, to a psychologist, is a somewhat knuckle-headed technique in self-deception, and it is to merely deny the truth of something someone does not want to confront.
Graphic by Steven Hathaway Venn Diagram of cluelessness, self-deception and denial.
Clearly, Dunning believes that we are incarcerated in a prison of cluelessness. But is there any possibility of escape? I had some additional questions for Dunning, and so we arranged to speak again.
DAVID DUNNING: Here’s a thought. The road to self-insight really runs through other people. So it really depends on what sort of feedback you are getting. Is the world telling you good things? Is the world rewarding you in a way that you would expect a competent person to be rewarded? If you watch other people, you often find there are different ways to do things; there are better ways to do things. I’m not as good as I thought I was, but I have something to work on. Now, the sad part about that is — there’s been a replication of this with medical students — people at the bottom, if you show them what other people do, they don’t get it. They don’t realize that what those other people are doing is superior to what they’re doing. And that’s the troubling thing. So for people at the bottom, that social comparison information is a wonderful piece of information, but they may not be in a position to take advantage of it like other people.
ERROL MORRIS: But wait a second. You’re supposed to benefit from feedback. But the people that you’ve picked are dunderheads. And you lack the ability to discriminate between dunderheads and non-dunderheads, between good advice and bad advice, between that which makes sense and that which makes no sense. So the community does you no damn good!
DAVID DUNNING: You know, I think that is an issue. Those among us who are in the 40th percentile, they’re not the best, but they’re not doing too badly. But people at the bottom, you’re going to have to be open-minded and you’re going to have some special hurdles, internal hurdles you have to get over. If people give you conflicting advice, congratulations, you don’t know how to choose. Yes, it is a tricky part of the problem.
ERROL MORRIS: And aren’t there some tasks where we’re all incompetent, where humanity itself is in the bottom quartile, so to speak?
DAVID DUNNING: Well, that has to be true for some tasks, right? There are just some tasks that are incredibly hard. How many centuries have gone by, and we still don’t have world peace? Yes, there are things that we’re just bad at.
Source.
Emphasis mine.
...Psychologists over the past 50 years have demonstrated the sheer genius people have at convincing themselves of congenial conclusions while denying the truth of inconvenient ones. You can call it self-deception, but it also goes by the names rationalization, wishful thinking, defensive processing, self-delusion, and motivated reasoning. There is a robust catalogue of strategies people follow to believe what they want to, and we research psychologists are hardly done describing the shape or the size of that catalogue. All this rationalization can lead people toward false beliefs, or perhaps more commonly, to tenaciously hang on to false beliefs they should really reconsider.
Denial, to a psychologist, is a somewhat knuckle-headed technique in self-deception, and it is to merely deny the truth of something someone does not want to confront.
Graphic by Steven Hathaway Venn Diagram of cluelessness, self-deception and denial.Clearly, Dunning believes that we are incarcerated in a prison of cluelessness. But is there any possibility of escape? I had some additional questions for Dunning, and so we arranged to speak again.
DAVID DUNNING: Here’s a thought. The road to self-insight really runs through other people. So it really depends on what sort of feedback you are getting. Is the world telling you good things? Is the world rewarding you in a way that you would expect a competent person to be rewarded? If you watch other people, you often find there are different ways to do things; there are better ways to do things. I’m not as good as I thought I was, but I have something to work on. Now, the sad part about that is — there’s been a replication of this with medical students — people at the bottom, if you show them what other people do, they don’t get it. They don’t realize that what those other people are doing is superior to what they’re doing. And that’s the troubling thing. So for people at the bottom, that social comparison information is a wonderful piece of information, but they may not be in a position to take advantage of it like other people.
ERROL MORRIS: But wait a second. You’re supposed to benefit from feedback. But the people that you’ve picked are dunderheads. And you lack the ability to discriminate between dunderheads and non-dunderheads, between good advice and bad advice, between that which makes sense and that which makes no sense. So the community does you no damn good!
DAVID DUNNING: You know, I think that is an issue. Those among us who are in the 40th percentile, they’re not the best, but they’re not doing too badly. But people at the bottom, you’re going to have to be open-minded and you’re going to have some special hurdles, internal hurdles you have to get over. If people give you conflicting advice, congratulations, you don’t know how to choose. Yes, it is a tricky part of the problem.
ERROL MORRIS: And aren’t there some tasks where we’re all incompetent, where humanity itself is in the bottom quartile, so to speak?
DAVID DUNNING: Well, that has to be true for some tasks, right? There are just some tasks that are incredibly hard. How many centuries have gone by, and we still don’t have world peace? Yes, there are things that we’re just bad at.
Source.
Emphasis mine.
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