Why you might think you’re great at your job, even if you’re not

If love is blind, so is stupidity, apparently.

(iStock)

If “real knowledge is to know the extent of one’s ignorance”; we might as well all submit ourselves to artificial intelligence.

A study shows that people with a lower IQ tend to overestimate their intellectual capabilities, to the extent that they become ignorant of their ignorance.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect first came to fruition in 1999 when then-Cornell University psychologists David Dunning and Justin Kruger launched a study into “meta-ignorance” explaining why incompetent people are often unaware of their incompetence in the workplace and beyond.

Do you think you're a workplace superhero? (iStock)

Across four studies, they found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests in humour, grammar and logic grossly overestimated their abilities.

For example, a group of Cornell undergraduates took a grammar test and afterwards were asked to predict how they did. The lowest scoring students were the ones who overestimated their abilities the most, with those scoring higher than just 10 per cent of the other participants presumed they’d scored better than 67 per cent.

In other words, it’s been proven to feel like you’re crushing it even when you’re failing.

Confused? Or are you totally getting this because you’re, like, really clever and super competent?

Imagine Joe. Joe is an accountant. Joe thinks that he is very good at Excel spreadsheets, when in actual fact, none of his sums add up and he keeps confusing his rows for columns i.e. total admin mare.

The thing is, poor old Joe thinks his spreadsheets are glorious. They’re his specialty, his party trick, his pièce de résistance.

Joe's just smashed out another awesome spreadsheet (iStock)

The fact that Joe is unable to see past his ineptitude and recognise his deficiencies is a classic example of the Dunning-Kruger Effect in action – not simply another case of the male ego.

“The knowledge and intelligence that are required to be good at a task are often the same qualities needed to recognise that one is not good at that task,” Dr Dunning told Forbes, “and if one lacks such knowledge and intelligence, one remains ignorant that one is not good at that task.”

Sucks for Joe.

"To great spreadsheets!" (iStock)

But he’s not the only one. Similar studies prove that overestimating one’s abilities is a cognitive bias that has long been an aspect of our culture.

In a faculty study at the University of Nebraska, 68 per cent of professors rated themselves in the top 25 per cent for teaching ability, whilst 90 per cent rated themselves above average, despite this being mathematically impossible.

And this false sense of confidence doesn’t just derive from our capabilities in the workplace. A nationwide survey in the US found that 21 per cent of Americans believe that it’s “very likely” or “fairly likely” that they will become millionaires within the next decade.

Oh, the American Dream.