Dunning-Kruger and Imposter Syndrome: Confidence Crises
You know when you start learning something new and immediately consider yourself an expert? There’s a name for that.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect is a cognitive bias where people overestimate their abilities. It usually refers to beginners who are unable to recognise their own ignorance or incompetence. The term was coined in 1999 by psychologists, David Dunning and Justin Kruger whose paper outlined that “people tend to hold overly favorable (sic) views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains.” They suggested that this usually happens because people lack the “metacognitive ability” to recognise their errors. This kind of confidence is known as “overprecision”, and it refers to the discrepancy between someone’s skills and their perception of their ability.
Perhaps you haven’t experience this personally, but we all have experience with it. Think of your arrogant colleague who always thinks they have the answer, or the difficult student who won’t listen when a teacher explains an alternative answer to a question.
This is the ‘Peak of “Mount Stupid”, as outlined in the graphic below.
Alternatively, I would just rephrase it as “beginner’s confidence”. Most people experience this when they start learning to code, for example. From a non-tech perspective, coding seems daunting and impossible to learn; however, once you start learning, your confidence skyrockets. Perhaps you’re doing an online course or tutorial, and you suddenly perceive yourself as a professional. It may not be ‘Mount Stupid’, but it’s certainly naïve, and there soon comes a point where you realise your ignorance.
This is where the second stage comes in: ‘Valley of Despair’. Once the Dunning-Kruger effect has been pierced and you no longer think you know best, your confidence plummets. “I’ve worked this hard and I still don’t know anything. Will I ever be good at this?!” You gain some humility, but you lose almost all of your confidence in the process. I felt this at several points during my coding bootcamp; just when I felt like I was getting good at something, we’d move onto a new subject and I’d realise how far I still had to go.
The next stage is the ‘Slope of Enlightenment’. After the initial high and the sudden low, you start to think about how you might be able to reach the desired level of competence. You slowly start to learn, acknowledging your ignorance and likely asking for more help than you did in the initial phase. You gain knowledge and experience and, increasingly, confidence.
Suddenly, you find your confidence is high again. This time, you actually know what you’re talking about. Your perception of your ability isn’t far off the truth, and when you don’t know something, you know how to find the answer. In web development, you can never know anything, but the good, competent developers know how to read documentation or ask the right questions to find the solution.
This is the ‘Plateau of Sustainability’, and it’s how you make a career out of this thing you are learning. It’s not such an emotional rollercoaster, your confidence is relatively high and, this time, you actually know what you’re talking about. Hurrah!
But what about the other side of the coin? Perhaps, like me, you’ve never felt confident or good at your chosen subject. You think everyone else knows what they’re doing, and you’re waiting to be outed as a fraud.
80% of people have experienced imposter syndrome, and I’d go so far as to say almost all coders have felt it at some point, whether while learning or while applying for jobs. If you’re a perfectionist, you might want to “get better” at something before putting yourself out there. You might compare yourself to your peers, forgetting that they’re likely to be putting on a brave face as well!
How does imposter syndrome interact with the Dunning-Kruger effect? Let’s think about the ‘Valley of Despair’, where your confidence is low and you have a very low perception of your ability, likely an underestimation.
The solution to both of these is education. You can’t make progress until you acknowledge what you don’t know, then you can make a plan and start developing your skills and educating yourself again. You gradually move up the ‘Slope of Enlightenment’, and suddenly you find yourself feeling more confident. You acknowledge the gaps in your knowledge and work to fill them. You wave goodbye to both the Dunning-Kruger arrogance and the imposter insecurities, and you make consistent, sustainable progress.
That’s the real secret!
What do you think? Would you consider yourself typically over or under confident? I’d love to know your thoughts, so please do share in the comments!
