"There are three things extremely hard: steel, a diamond, and to know one’s self”
I’d always considered myself above average. Then, one day, I accidentally drove away from a gas station while my car was still being fuelled. As you can imagine, it was something of a scene; the safety release tore loose, showering the pavement with gasoline. The metal bearing on the end of the hose snapped forward, smashing out my rear window, and covering the seats in a hail of safety glass. My passenger (understandably) screamed. Eight or nine feet from the station, I rolled to a stop, trailing nozzle and hose like a shameful rubber tail. As I stepped from the vehicle, I was met by the station attendant, who was in a state somewhere between disbelief and sputtering fury. He spouted several well-warranted expletives (for the sake of clarity, a hint: the most prominent of them rhymed with “fire truck”).
“Er. Sorry,” I replied, stupidly.
Then, I removed the nozzle from the tank, passed hose and nozzle to the attendant, lurched back to my car, and drove off as quickly as was legally possible. As I glanced in my rearview before rounding the corner, the attendant was still standing there, hose in hand, looking miserable. It’s one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done. And the worst part was, I couldn’t explain any of it. I’d always considered myself a good driver. A person with decent observational skill, and above-average intelligence. And yet there I was, about 10 seconds away from being featured on “failblog.” My self-image had taken a serious beating; in a single, infuriating moment, I realized that I wasn’t as good at something as I thought I was.
If statistics are any indication, you, too, consider yourself to be above average. The good news is, we’re in great company; according to research, it’s a group that includes almost everyone ever surveyed (94 percent of college professors, in one study). The bad news is, we’re probably wrong. As it turns out, psychologists have spent more than 30 years studying our ability to self-assess—that is, measuring our image of ourselves against objective reality. They’ve examined everything from intellect, skill, workplace performance, academic excellence, sense of humour, empathy, ability to detect lying, logic and honesty. And what they’ve concluded, after decades of work in countries all over the world, is essentially this: none of us are as good at anything as we think we are.
“If you look at the relationship between what people think about themselves, and the reality of themselves, you do find a relationship, but it’s really modest,” explains David Dunning, a professor of psychology at Cornell. “Sometimes it even evaporates down to zero. Self-impressions aren’t worthless, but the connection between what people think about themselves and what they objectively do is far weaker than anybody suspects.”
If anyone would know, it’s Dunning; his published research on accuracy in human judgement goes back more than 20 years. Perhaps best-known for defining a cognitive bias known as the Dunning-Kruger Effect (more on that below), he has also written a book on the science of self-perception, and was awarded an Ig Nobel Prize for his work back in 2000. His conclusions are much the same as those of his contemporaries: we’re terrible at rendering accurate self-judgements. And we’re extremely overconfident.
“What I’m surprised by is how uncontroversial this research is,” Dunning chuckles. “If I give a talk and say that we don’t really know ourselves that well, the reaction that people have is: ‘Oh yeah, I see other people do that all the time.’”
Just how bad is it? According to the Pearson Product-Moment Correlation Coefficient, a formula used to calculate similarities between variables (it was created by Karl Pearson, who, by all accounts, wasn’t as great as he thought, either), the correlation between your view of yourself and objective reality is approximately 0.29—very weak indeed, considering it falls on a scale between zero and 1, with zero being no correlation at all. A 1982 study comparing perceptions of intelligence to actual performance on intelligence tests found a correlation of only 0.2. Subsequent studies of workplace performance, academic excellence, managerial competence and interpersonal skill found roughly equivalent correlations, with interpersonal skill ranking the lowest—a paltry 0.17 (for the sake of comparison, consider that over the period from 1999 to 2009, the correlation between the annual number of Nicolas Cage films released and the annual number of deaths by drowning in a swimming pool is almost four times as strong—0.666). This overconfidence appears to be largely a North American and Western European phenomenon, and manifests (at least on intelligence tests) more often in men than in women. While hardly as compelling as a gasoline-fuelled inferno, these correlations nonetheless indicate that, as Dunning wrote in 2004, our ability to self-assess is “flawed in systematic ways that carry significant implications.”
In other words, not only is there overwhelming proof that you suck more than you thought, but the ways in which you suck have been exhaustively and scientifically quantified. In fact, it appears that our perception of ourselves is so meagre, that it can easily be matched by the assessments of strangers. A 1993 study had strangers rate the intelligence of test subjects, and found that their assessments matched the subject’s performance on an IQ test about as often as the self-assessments of the subjects themselves. More demoralizing still, it appears that the less competent we are, the less able we are to recognize our own incompetence—the aforementioned Dunning-Kruger Effect. A 2003 study which compared perception to reality determined that, on a final exam, the lowest-performing college students in the course (the bottom 25 percent), genuinely believed their results would be better than most of their classmates. Or, as Dunning writes: “If you’re incompetent, you can’t know you’re incompetent. The skills you need to produce a right answer are exactly the skills you need to recognize what a right answer is.”
Now, before you go out and slit your wrists (a task at which, scientifically speaking, you’re likely far less competent than you think), keep in mind that there is hope. There are strategies that can serve to narrow the gap between perception and reality. Bench-marking (detailed comparisons of one’s performance with that of others), reviewing video of past performance, and peer feedback have all shown promising results—provided said feedback is frequent and specific. Essentially, as Dunning explains, because our peers have proven to be better at recognizing our skills and predicting our behaviours than we are, their opinions can be a more valuable asset than we’d ever expected.
“It’s good to have mentors,” he concludes. “It’s good to get feedback from others. I tell graduate students that if two people give you the same piece of corrective feedback, then at least consider the possibility that it might be true. I have a sort of pet phrase I use a lot, and I think it’s an important one: the road to self-knowledge runs through other people.”
The evidence is, as of yet, inconclusive on how this all relates to driving skill. Either way, I ride a bike now.