Dunning-Kruger on the rise

The Washington Post reports on the Dunning-Kruger effect:

During the election and in the months after the presidential inauguration, interest in the Dunning-Kruger effect surged. Google searches for “dunning kruger” peaked in May 2017, according to Google Trends, and has remained high since then. Attention spent on the Dunning-Kruger Effect Wikipedia entry has skyrocketed since late 2015.

I learned about the Dunning-Kruger effect in 2010 from a David Pescovitz post to Boing Boing. D-K helped me understand so much about the perspectives of students with serious writing deficits. In October 2016 I came up with the name Dunning K. Trump.

I don’t know what it means that an article about the Dunning-Kruger effect has an error in subject-verb agreement. Did you catch it in the excerpt?

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The Dunning-Kruger effect

David Pescovitz posted at Boing Boing last week on the Dunning-Kruger effect, which accounts for a curious relationship between incompetence and confidence. From the abstract of a 1999 paper by Cornell psychology professor David A. Dunning and (then) graduate student Justin Kruger:

People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. The authors suggest that 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.

The Dunning-Kruger effect helps to explain why students with serious writing deficits can often have wildly inflated opinions of their abilities (and thus regard as “nitpicky” someone who points out run-on sentences and tangled syntax). Dunning-Kruger also helps to explain why the students who worry most about their competence are usually those with genuinely strong skills.

And Dunning-Kruger helps me to understand my unease about recommendation forms that ask for an appraisal of student self-confidence. Instead of answering, I write “A high level of self-confidence is not necessarily a good thing.” Maybe now I’ll just write “See Dunning and Kruger (1999).”

Dunning K. Trump

The Dunning-Kruger effect has interested me since I wrote a short post about it in 2010. Dunning-Kruger helped explain something I had noticed in teaching: that students with serious deficits often have wildly inflated opinions about their ability. According to Dunning-Kruger, a lack of competence entails an inability to recognize one’s lack of competence.

Watching the presidential debate last night left me convinced that Donald Trump is, among other things, a victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect. He has no understanding of how government works, no grasp of how military strategy works, and he has no understanding that he lacks an understanding. Thus his ludicrous assertions: that Hillary Clinton should have changed the tax system (at some point during her “thirty years” in government), that the United States military needs to employ “the element of surprise.” In the second debate he called for “a sneak attack.” A sneak attack! That sounds like the suggestion of a bright third-grader.

And Trump has no understanding that he lacks an understanding of how his words might sound to anyone not already allied with him. “Nobody has more respect for women than I do,” he declared last night. And audience members laughed. I’m reminded of the story of a Hollywood mogul declaring, “I’ve got more class than any son of a bitch in the room.” Or words to that effect.

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Steve Bushakis and Donald Trump

Errol Morris and David Dunning

There have been many psychological studies that tell us what we see and what we hear is shaped by our preferences, our wishes, our fears, our desires and so forth. We literally see the world the way we want to see it. But the Dunning-Kruger effect suggests that there is a problem beyond that. Even if you are just the most honest, impartial person that you could be, you would still have a problem — namely, when your knowledge or expertise is imperfect, you really don’t know it. Left to your own devices, you just don’t know it. We’re not very good at knowing what we don’t know.

Errol Morris talks with David Dunning about the Dunning-Kruger effect and “unknown unknowns”:

The Anosognosic’s Dilemma (New York Times)

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The Dunning-Kruger effect

Dunning on Dunning-Kruger

The April 22 This American Life episode “In Defense of Ignorance” has a segment in which David Dunning talks about the Dunning-Kruger effect (beginning at 28:58). The classroom stories will ring a bell for any teacher.

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[And now only two TAL episodes in my podcast backlog.]

Dunning-Kruger geography

Our president, freestyling:

“I have great respect for the U.K. United Kingdom. Great respect. People call it Britain. They call it Great Britain. They call it — they used to call it England, different parts.”

From Garner’s Modern English Usage:

Great Britain consists of England, Scotland, and Wales — all three on the island known to the Romans as Britannia. (Modern usage routinely shortens the name to Britain.) It differs from United Kingdom, which also includes Northern Ireland.

Some people wrongly think of Great Britain as a boastful name. But it’s not: it’s rooted in history. Great Britain was once contrasted with Little Britain (or simply Brittany), in France, where the Celtic Bretons lived. Although the OED’s last citation for Little Britain dates from 1622, the term Great Britain has persisted (though perhaps not without a sense of pride).

Don’t get me started on the Channel Islands, the Crown Dependencies, and the difference between the British Islands and the British Isles. So many parts!

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[The Dunning-Kruger effect: a lack of competence entails an inability to recognize one’s lack of competence.]

The De Palma-Dunning-Kruger effect

From the Taxi episode “The Ten Percent Solution,“ first aired January 7, 1981. Louie De Palma (Danny DeVito) to Tony Banta (Tony Danza):

“Banta, sometimes I wish you were smarter, just so you’d know how dumb you are.”

Almost nineteen years before the 1999 paper that introduced the Dunning-Kruger effect, Louie (or, really, the episode’s writer, Pat Allee) was on the right track.

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A Dunning-Kruger moment

From today’s Vanity Fair piece about Donald Trump’s presidency:

Several months ago, according to two sources with knowledge of the conversation, former chief strategist Steve Bannon told Trump that the risk to his presidency wasn’t impeachment, but the 25th Amendment — the provision by which a majority of the Cabinet can vote to remove the president. When Bannon mentioned the 25th Amendment, Trump said, “What’s that?”

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The Dunning-Kruger effect
Dunning K. Trump
Frederick who?
Ties, misspellings, typos

A reminder

I was out doing errands this morning. I came home to the news. The news. The news. And now I want to repost this image, which I first posted on May 15:



And to preserve the asterisk, which signifies impeached and carries a bonus Kurt Vonnegut overtone:


[Click either image for a larger view.]

Donald Trump*’s revelations to Bob Woodward are further evidence of the Dunning-Kruger effect at work, made worse by dementia. What did Trump* think Woodward was going to make of these revelations? And how did Trump* think people would respond?

Richard Nixon at least had cunning enough to keep his tapes under wraps, at least until he couldn’t.

*

Yep, Dunning-Kruger. From Kaitlin Collins (CNN):

One reason Trump was so irritated aides didn't tell him about Woodward’s attempts to interview him for his last book [Fear ] was because he thought he could have made himself look better in it.

And from Maggie Haberman (The New York Times):

Mr. Trump gave Mr. Woodward extensive access to his White House and to top officials in the hopes the eventual book would be “positive,” in his eyes. Mr. Trump did not speak to Mr. Woodward for his first book on the Trump presidency, Fear, and the president has maintained publicly and to advisers that it would have turned out better had he personally participated.

Dunning-Kruger Montaigne

From Montaigne, “Of Presumption” (1580):

It is commonly said that good sense is the gift Nature has distributed most fairly among us, for there is no one who is unsatisfied with the share he has been allowed — and isn’t that reasonable enough? For whoever saw beyond this would be beyond his sight. I think my opinions are good and sound, but who does not think the same of his own?

Quoted in Ward Farnsworth’s The Practicing Stoic: A Philosophical User’s Manual (Boston: David R. Godine, 2018). Adapted from an unidentified public-domain translation.

Farnsworth’s gloss: “Our limited capacities prevent us from perceiving our limited capacities.”

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Nancy Dunning-Kruger

[Nancy, December 29, 2020.]

For a better 2021, read Nancy every day.

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“Rewording”

A surprising number of college students are devoted to what they call “rewording”: the practice of taking a passage from someone else’s writing and, uh, rewording it, without attribution. More surprising is that many such students see nothing wrong with this practice. More surprising still is that some of their professors see nothing wrong with it either and even encourage it. I suspect that the Dunning-Kruger effect is at work here: such professors must lack the competence to understand that what they’re encouraging is in fact plagiarism.

There are many authoritative explanations in print of paraphrase, plagiarism, and the inappropriateness of rewording without attribution. Here’s an excerpt from a helpful online explanation, from the Writing Center at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill:

What About Paraphrasing?

Paraphrasing means taking another person’s ideas and putting those ideas in your own words. Paraphrasing does NOT mean changing a word or two in someone else’s sentence, changing the sentence structure while maintaining the original words, or changing a few words to synonyms. If you are tempted to rearrange a sentence in any of these ways, you are writing too close to the original. That’s plagiarizing, not paraphrasing.

Paraphrasing is a fine way to use another person’s ideas to support your argument as long as you attribute the material to the author and cite the source in the text at the end of the sentence. In order to make sure you are paraphrasing in the first place, take notes from your reading with the book closed. Doing so will make it easier to put the ideas in your own words. When you are unsure if you are writing too close to the original, check with your instructor BEFORE you turn in the paper for a grade. So, just to be clear—do you need to cite when you paraphrase? Yes, you do!

Plagiarism (The Writing Center, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill)

When I talk with students about these matters, I always point out that no matter what they’ve been told, “rewording” without attribution is plagiarism, though perhaps in a hapless and unsophisticated form. Imagine getting an F for a paper or a course without even realizing that you’re engaging in academic misconduct. That’s the Dunning-Kruger effect with a vengeance. Yipes.

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“Local Norms” and “‘organic’ attribution” (writing without quotation marks)
Old and unimproved (“How to e-mail a professor,” “reworded”)

[My knowledge of “rewording” comes from many conversations over many years with students who have studied in many different institutions. My syllabi and other course materials make clear that “rewording” is a no-no.]

Another take on Jared Kushner

Jennifer Rubin, also writing in The Washington Post:

If not evidence of malicious deception, the story reveals a young man who is in over his head and out of his depth to such a degree that he does not know he is in over his head and out of his depth.

A Dunning-Kruger defense. The Dunning-Kruger effect is the subject of a number of OCA posts.

[Did you know that a .mil, .gov., or .edu e-mail address gets you a free subscription to The Washington Post ?]

Be prepared (?)

““I think I’m very well prepared. I don’t think I have to prepare very much”: Dunning K. Trump, commenting on his upcoming meeting with Kim Jong-un. Yeah, you got this.

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Dunning K. Trump*

Donald Trump*, speaking for the cameras about the coronavirus yesterday:

“I like this stuff. You know, my uncle was a great person, he was at MIT. He taught at MIT for I think like a record number of years. He was a great super-genius, Doctor John Trump. I like this stuff. I really get it. People are surprised that I understand it. Every one of the doctors said, ‘How do you know so much about this?’ Maybe I have a natural ability. Maybe I should have done that instead of running for president.”

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[My transcription. John G. Trump was at MIT from 1936 to 1973. A long run, but hardly “a record number of years.”]

Ignorant of ignorance

In The New York Times, Thomas B. Edsall writes about what can happen “when the president is ignorant of his own ignorance.” The term missing from this piece: Dunning-Kruger effect.

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Dunning K. Trump

You don’t have to be a psychiatrist . . . .

Dunning-Kruger moment of the year, if you’re declaring a “national emergency”: “I didn’t need to do this.”

“The” four

I’m enough of a snoot to be dismayed when I see the following headline in The New York Times: “The Four ‘Attachment Styles,’ and How They Sabotage Your Work-Life Balance.” I’m less put off by the cliché at the end than by the magic number at the start. The four, the only four. “The” four might be more honest.

But I read on. And for a sentence or two, I thought I could see a sitting president in the description of “dismissive avoidant attachment”:

Individuals with dismissive avoidant attachment at work tend to think they are smart and everyone else is stupid. Well, maybe not exactly stupid, but definitely not as smart as they are. They most likely decide what they should do and then ignore what others want. This leads to conflict and mistrust. This mistrust can lead to others attempting to micromanage and monitor them, which just makes them more annoyed and more likely to dismiss input.

That sounds like President Dunning-Kruger himself. (The Times reports that he calls aides “Fucking idiots!”)

I read on, about “How to tell if this is you”:

From your perspective, the biggest time management issue tends to be working late. Long hours usually arise when you get fixated on doing a particular project really well. Or they can happen because you want to work on what you consider to be important first and then you also have to complete work for others.

Working long hours? Completing work for others? Only if you count watching television and being your own chief of staff.

I jumped back a few paragraphs, and now thought that our president might fit the description of “anxious preoccupied attachment”: “fear of upsetting others,” “a compulsion to check email [or in his case, Fox News] incessantly to make sure everything is ‘O.K.,’” “attention . . . hijacked whenever you experience a perceived ‘threat.’” And: “The idea of saying no may terrify you.” But the president seems to have no problem saying no to reading daily intelligence briefings, &c.

I jumped ahead and decided that one can also see in the president an element of “fearful avoidant attachment”:

You tend to spend most of your time in a state of being overwhelmed because you fear everything and feel very little power to do anything about your fears (much less the work that is also piling up).

Fear of an eleven-letter word beginning with i, for instance.

And one can find in the president at least a trace of the fourth and last style, “secure attachment style.” People with this style “know [think?] they are capable, and they are confident that others will respond well to them.” That certainly sounds like our president: “Nobody knows more about,” &c. “I alone can fix it.” “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay?”

In other words, people can be slotted into “the” four or five or six anything, one slot per person, only if you’re looking to attract eyeballs on the Internets.

It doesn’t surprise me that Elizabeth Grace Saunders, the discoverer of “the” four, also has “the” three, in book form: The 3 Secrets to Effective Time Investment.

This is one of the two posts I’ve written today.

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Beyond categories (On categories and art)

[Secrets to, not of? Well, I said that I’m a snoot. ]

The Adam Wheeler story

Says his lawyer, “He’s never been in trouble before.” But Adam Wheeler is in trouble now.

For me, the most remarkable detail in the Adam Wheeler story is his application essay for the Rhodes Scholarship, which plagiarized the work of Stephen Greenblatt. A Harvard English major plagiarizing the work of a Harvard English professor: the plagiarizer’s self-confidence suggests the Dunning-Kruger effect. Then again, Wheeler’s Harvard career seems to have given him good reason to think that he could get away with anything.

I suspect a movie in a couple of years. A good title: Veritas.

Campuses Ensnared by “Life of Deception” (New York Times)
Ex-Harvard Student, Adam Wheeler, Pleads Not Guilty to Charges of Fabricating Academic History (Harvard Crimson)
Wheeler’s résumé (via The New Republic, where Wheeler applied for an internship)

“You got this”

There’s nothing wrong about trying to instill in college students a non-panicky attitude toward final exams. But there is, I believe, something wrong about the reassurance that’s become ubiquitous before finals: “You got this.”

“You got this” presents an exam as a measure not of knowledge but of trust in one’s ability. The reassurance is glib and condescending, and it’s likely to feed inflated self-confidence. Yeah, I got this, says every victim of the Dunning-Kruger effect.

Better than empty reassurance: practical advice. Many years ago I worked out such advice for my students, and I later wrote it up in a post: How to do well on a final exam. My students tended to do exceedingly well on final exams. But for anyone intent on going in the other direction: How to do horribly on a final exam.