Are you suffering from Dunning-Kruger syndrome?

This really happened. Am not joking! Look it up…

“Hands up everyone!” He said aloud, pointing a loaded gun around the hall. “This is a robbery!” He walked straight to the teller man, placed a large bag on the counter and said “Fill it up!”

The teller, did as instructed, but was impressed with the confidence of McArthur. He walked in to rob a bank without his face mask.

“Why are you not wearing a mask?” inquired the teller, while filling the bag. “What mask? I am invisible. Am I not?” Replied McArthur.

He misunderstood the chemical composition of “Lemon Juice” for “Invisible Ink”. With this incompetent confidence, he assumed that the cameras in the bank would not be able to identify him.

McArthur is a classic case of someone suffering from “Dunning-Kruger” Syndrome.

In the field of psychology David Dunning & Justin Kruger talk about an illusory superiority that people believe (suffer from) in. This happens because of misjudging their cognitive abilities as greater, than it actually is. It is the inability to understand your incompetence, leading to inflated self-assessment.

I am sure we can think of a few names at work who might be under the influence of this syndrome. Don’t we?

The picture below explains the syndrome in a simple manner.

Now let us re-position this this from a learning design perspective. Most of our perfectly planned and flawlessly executed learning programs, somehow still do not meet the intended outcomes for Everyone.

We account this to ‘human factor’. There is always someone in your participant group, who is ‘above the rest’. They keep double guessing your intentions and de-briefs. They are the ones who KNOW it all.

Could they be suffering from the ‘Dunning-Kruger’ effect and never got beyond the point of ‘I was blind and now I see’?

Is it possible that our design did not address that important gateway and those suffering from the effect did not see the possibilities beyond what they thought they already know?

True learning takes place only when, the mind realizes that there is more to learn than what it already knows. Unless we overcome that, all learning designs will fail.

Our learning designs and programs should first address that, before getting the participants to learn.

The Dunning-Kruger syndrome was recognized by the Nobel committee as an important psychological finding. Should we recognize it, and embed it as a first confirmation, before we proceed with the rest of the design? or…

Are we suffering from it as well …

WRITTEN BY

Chaithanya Kothapalli