Time and time again, we are told that confidence will get us far. However, there are always some people who certainly could use a little reducer for their overflowing confidence. I’m sure everybody here have met one or two people in their lives who talks big but does not really amount to anything. Is that a bad thing? Yes it is.
But the thing is, each and every one of us has this tendency. We deem ourselves as better than others because we don’t have the ability to evaluate ourselves accurately. In fact, we often overestimate our abilities whether consciously or unconsciously. Why? Because we all have our own set of incompetency whether it’s in the field of mathematics, performing, financial management, and etc.
This phenomena is called the Dunning-Kruger Effect. According to psychologist Dunning and Kruger in their research in 1999, those who are actually incompetent are the people who think of themselves as better than others. Average people rate themselves as better than most when it comes to health, leadership skills, ethics, and beyond. But the intriguing part is, those exact same people are those who are with the least abilities.
These people are most likely to lack adequate logical reasoning, poor grammar, incompetent in financial managing, bad at math, emotionally unstable, lack of knowledge in running a medical lab test, and playing chess. All of them exaggerate their abilities and even group themselves with experts.
In conclusion, people who makes mistake and arrive at poor decisions are the people who blinded by their faults and lack of skills while people who are experts at something are aware of their abilities but makes the mistake of assuming that others are as skilled as they are. But of course, there are some ways to avoid being that annoying friend who talks a lot but is no good.
Source: Ted-Ed
