#217 David Dunning – Episode Notes

David Dunning is the social psychologist best known for his study into why people have problems recognizing their own incompetence which is know as the – “Dunning-Kruger effect”.

His research focuses on the psychology underlying human misbelief. In his most widely-cited work, he showed that people tend to hold flattering opinions of their competence, character, and prospects that cannot be justified from objective evidence.

Dunning’s other research focuses on decision-making in various settings and how our preferences distort our judgements and conclusions.

This fascinating episode explores David’s decision making process, how to protect against psychological biases and advice on developing your learning abilities!

Key Takeaways

“Knowing yourself isn’t a destination, it truly is a job or a journey. Something that you have to work on because you do change, the world changes more importantly, and so you can never be certain that you’re settled.”

“Opportunity itself is luck. What you do with it is all you”

Letting opportunities present themselves is much more valuable than trying to create them yourself

Experts and mentors will have a better shot of filling in the gaps of knowledge that we may not always be able to pick up

“Individually we’re all unique and we’re all characters, but when you get to a specific situation or circumstance, we’re all more alike each other than not”

04:15: What contributed to David’s success in his career?

Planning is a key component to building success

David spends each night planning out what the next day is going to look like for him

• “Thinking about what you’re going to do is what I find to be the best way to get it done”

06:00: Defining David’s Work

David is an experimental social psychologist

• “If I were to describe what I do, is I tell stories about human nature, but I do so under the rigor of science”

The stories David tells take time to build and explain so that others will find what he finds compelling and true

A story David and his lab continue to come back to is how well do we fulfill the Greek delphic maxim, “Know thyself”

• “Knowing yourself isn’t a destination, it truly is a job or a journey. Something that you have to work on because you do change, the world changes more importantly, and so you can never be certain that you’re settled.”

09:45: Don’t be afraid to explore multiple paths

Exploration is one of the best practices to find a career path and find those who can help build that career

David explored multiple paths like cartoonist, screenwriting, economist, before find his way into psychology

• “I just explored, that is I didn’t try to rush into a decision. Just explore”

You will meet people along the way to your path that might or might not be a direction connection to the career you want, but those mentors are invaluable 

12:10: Never Settle

As a psychologist and a storyteller, David is always trying to dig deeper

You can be satisfied with what you find but you should always be wanting to know more 

• “I question the work that I’ve done. I think about connections that my work has to other work. I try to figure out, for example, if there’s a way to transform the work into a more basic question.”

It’s not coming up with the ideas, it’s recognizing the ideas that are important

When it comes to transforming the work, David sees it not so much as being able to develop opportunity but being able to recognize opportunity or a good idea

• “Opportunity itself is luck. What you do with it is all you”
• Letting opportunities present themselves is much more valuable than trying to create them yourself

15:07: Measuring Luck

Luck plays a far bigger role in our lives making it hard to measure it to skill

You can try to be active and create situations and opportunities where you are providing more chances for you to be lucky

• David is a true believer that luck favors the prepared

In David’s career, he recognizes that he has done plenty of good things in his work but there is the one that luck took hold of, which is the Dunning-Kruger Effect

• In 2000, New York Times reporter, Erica Goode, found their work and found it intriguing enough to publish a story on it
• His work snowballed from there and continues to snowball 20 years later
• “There is no way you can call that anything but luck”

18:20: Dunning-Kruger Effect

The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a family of different effects and predictions

People focus in on is the idea that incompetent people don’t know they are incompetent 

• Dunning and Kruger went farther with this and said that in many areas of life, those people can’t know or they are not in a position to know
• “If you are inexpert or incompetent or unknowledgeable, you lack the expertise that’s needed to recognze your lack of expertise”

David began to explore this path while working with various students through academia and realizing that many did not realize that lack of expertise

• “…Wondering, do they have any doubt in what they are saying?”

25:13: Feedback vs. Noise

As you get older, you’ve been through cycles so many times that once you develop a project, you have an idea of what reviewers might say

• Errors made in the past
• Biases or prejudices reviewers might have

David is always learning and thinking into the future of how projects will play out based on feedback

• “Think of the project you’re working on, project yourself into the future, and find it was a disaster. Ok, what happened to make it a disaster?”

26:50: Misconceptions of Dunning-Kruger Effect

The key thing with the Dunning-Kruger Effect is that we all suffer from it one way or another, but people have false ideas of what it actually entails

The first misconception is people believe this effect is focusing on confidence instead of competence

• “It’s not that incompetent people are the most confident among everybody. They are the most overconfident, that is they anticipate a wee bit but they don’t anticipate just how much their performances are poor.”

At the beginning, people also viewed this in terms of their bosses incompetence

This has morphed over the years to be not so much about expertise, but to be about beginners and the overconfidence they experience when introducing themselves to a new field

30:31 Viewing Knowledge and Skill as a Jigsaw Puzzle

When it comes down to individual skills, people are a lot more alike than they might think

David views this as a jigsaw puzzle where on a minute scale there’s plenty of similarities, but then you step back and it makes something unique

• “Each individual piece of who we are looks a lot like other people. We’re not all that special, but if you put everything together, the picture that gets created is a special one”

The issue that comes up with this view of jigsaw puzzle is there are pieces that are invisible to us in terms of knowledge

• “We know what we know, but what we don’t know has to be larger”

This ties into the Territory of Unknown Unknowns, where things are so unknown to us that we can’t recognize that it is unknown

• In terms of language, there are plenty of other concepts that exist in something outside of what we know that we can’t begin to comprehend because of the language gap
• “There’s a lot of things that sit outside of our little encapsulation of knowledge, but a lot of things that lie outside of it, it’s just beyond the event horizon of our ability to see it”

34:00 Defining the Elite

When it comes to those who are elite in terms of skill, Edison, Jobs, etc., David points out that what you don’t see in them is complacency

These people should have special talents, but you should also be an overachiever

• “If you take a look at Lebron James, Michael Jordan, Lionel Messi, they are supremely talented but they also work on it hard”

Naive optimism has the potential to play into achieving the level of success of the greats

If it leads you to work harder and you work through the fatigue, pain, and hurdles to get you to your success, than naive optimism plays a big role

If the optimism leads to complacency, you won’t achieve the success of the elite

• “What the world shows us are the successes, what tends to be invisible are the people who are overconfident and as a consequences, they’re complacent”

40:50 Working with Experts

David stressed the importance of having mentors or experts you can turn to 

They will have a better shot of filling in the gaps of knowledge that we may not always be able to pick up

When it comes to approaching an expert, David notes things that he has come to understand over the years:

• Let the expert do the talking
• Ask the expert what you should be asking
• Don’t stop at just one expert
• Listen to the disagreements and not just the agreements

44:00 David’s Hardest Skills to Teach

The hardest skill to teach that David sees in himself and others is not walking away when you don’t understand

• “It’s important to say timeout, why is that important?”

The other thing that David brings up is having awareness that the world that the mentor or expert exists in might be very different than the one you’re living in

• “There’s a way to think about these issues that are different from the way that you’re thinking”
• Being young comes with a lot of unknowns and it can be easy that what we know is all there is

49:50 Frameworks that David Uses

David and Sean discuss recent podcast guest, Annie Duke and the frameworks she brings up in her recent book, How To Decide

• “Poker is a tremendous metaphor for life, because you could have a great decision and have it turn out badly but it’s the right decision”

The important thing David notes is to come in with the idea that you don’t have conclusions, you have ideas or hypotheses 

• “You’re going to act on [the hypotheses], but you’re going entertain the idea that you could be wrong”
• You should be open to midcourse corrections as you progress

Another framework David addresses is our usage of confirmatory thinking, which ties into confirmation bias

People seek why things are correct and looking for evidence that confirms what they already know

David believes people should add in a disconfirmatory thinking to their checklists

• Could I be wrong? Could it be different?
• “Having a checklist where you say can I be wrong, what’s a real test for the idea I have here, how might things turn out differently from the way I think, is a checklist to have not for every decision but for when it counts”

54:30 Sufficiently Communicating your Work

The important part of David’s work is that he should be able to communicate it to others and have them understand why they should care about it, as well as being able to communicate it to himself

David’s Process for Communicating his Work to HImself:

• Relate it to a real world circumstance 
• Finding where it would apply in the world
• Finding the connection with basic issues that have attracted writers and philosophers

57:00 David’s Information Gathering Process

The shorter, the better when it comes to David picking up new information

Some of this includes:

• Blogs
• Longform Internet content
• Books

David finds the most value in the things that lie outside of his expertise

01:01:20 People David Greatly Admires

Amos Tversky, an Isreali psychologist, who David and others would agree is the smartest man they ever met

• David admires the work him and Daniel Kahneman did 

As David grows older, he has begun to admire those that are good role models on how to be an older person

• Urie Bronfenbrenner
• Janet Reno
• Garret FitzGerald

01:06:30 Situationism

“Individually we’re all unique and we’re all characters, but when you get to a specific situation or circumstance, we’re all more alike each other than not”

David views certain outcomes will favor a person because of the situation and not the person itself, similar to luck

For example, is the type of person who becomes an elite tennis player the same as they would have been in 1980?

• The racquets were different, so how much does that play into who would be an elite tennis player then vs. now?