1) Hello, I’m Andre Mitidieri and welcome to my Frontiers of Science project.

The topic of
this video will be the Dunning-Kruger effect. In1995, McArthur Wheeler, robbed two
banks in Pittsburgh at daylight in plain sight, with no mask or anything to protect himself.
He had passed lemon juice on his skin before the robberies and convincingly believed
that this would render him invisibility. Later that night, the police arrested a surprised
McArthur Wheeler. When they showed him the surveillance tapes, Wheeler stared in
disbelief. “But I wore the juice,” he mumbled. The police concluded that Wheeler was
not crazy or on drugs—just incredibly mistaken. This unbelievable situation prompted
Dunning and Kruger, two researchers at Cornell University, to investigate this case and to
eventually discover that it’s explained by a cognitive bias that is now named after them:
the Dunning-Kruger effect.

2) Now, let’s understand what exactly it is. The Dunning Kruger effect is a cognitive bias
inherent to human knowledge that affects everybody. Don’t you know somebody who
believes they know things but really they don’t. The phenomenon behind it is precisely
the dunning-kruger effect. In general, this psychological bias protects us from reality
itself: it lets us process information and make decisions more quickly, but that doesn’t
mean it’s good. For instance, the Dunning-Kruger effect also allows us to convince
ourselves and be irreversibly confident that something is true even when the facts clearly
point to other directions. In other words, this behavioral phenomenon is essentially a
subjective social reality that helps explain why people feel that they're experts even
though they know very little about a problem or topic. In fact, Dunning and Kruger found
out that being ignorant about something not only reflected bad scores on objective tests,
but also blocked the individual from realizing how bad he or she was doing.

3) Now let’s dive into one of the experiments in which the Dunning-Kruger effect was
verified. In a 1992 survey of the engineers at a company, 42% of them believe they were
in the top 5% of all the engineers at the company, which is simply impossible because 42
cannot be 5. In reality, most of them grossly overestimated their abilities, leading to this
huge disparity between the self-assessment results and the actual percentile in which the
 engineers were on. The most interesting part, though, is that the employees that were
objectively ranked at the bottom (below the 25% percentile) were the ones that most
wrongly characterized their own competence. This just confirms the asymmetry between
being ignorant or unskilled about something and misjudging our own expertise.

4) The next part is probably the one I like the most about this phenomenon: the knowledge
graph. Looking at the Dunning-Kruger effect graphically, we can plot one's confidence in
your ability against one's actual knowledge in a field. As we learn something new we are
often highly confident because we know so little that as soon as we know a tiny bit we
think we know it all (that’s the referred “Peak of Mount Stupid). Those who stop learning
here maintain a false sense of mastery, in which the Dunning-Kruger effect is fully
functional. If we continue learning, we realize things are more complex and often lose
motivation. The more we increase our knowledge, the lower our confidence becomes.
Many stop at this stage thinking they've learned nothing (welcome to the Valley of
Despair) - only if we keep going can we regain confidence while getting better, what’s
known as the Slope of Enlightenment, and at the end we will be full of knowledge and
almost as confident in our ability as right after we started, comfortably settled at the
Plateau of Sustainability.

5) You may now be wondering about the Dunning-Kruger effect’s possible implications,
both theoretically and practically. Since the victims of this comprehensive psychological
bias, aka, people with a little bit of knowledge or skill in an area, believe that they are
better than they truly are, the consequences of such a self-overestimation can be harmful
sometimes. From experiments of assessing effective leadership, to raising children, to
constructing a solid logical argument, ignorance blindness is present everywhere and
might be dangerous when it manifests in delicate areas. For example, a 74 year old
woman awoke from a simple spinal fusion surgery in terrible pain because her surgeon
believed himself to be one of the best surgeons around and didn’t need anesthesia to
operate. Instead, he's now in prison for life: he's accused of maiming multiple patients
and causing two deaths. Meanwhile he claimed, quote, “everybody is doing it wrong” and
 that he was, quote again, “the best in the whole state”. A clear - and catastrophic -
example of the Dunning-Kruger effect’s consequences in real life.

6) Now let’s turn the page to explore, through another famous example, a new facet of the
Dunning-Kruger, a more subtle and treacherous one. Imagine that a simpleton, a good
student, and a wise teacher were to have a public debate. This is how things could go
down: the simpleton knows just a little bit but it's very confident and voices his opinions
very loudly and without hesitation. The student knows more but doesn't realize it because
she lacks confidence - she keeps quiet. The teacher is confident but understands how
complex things really are; hence, he expresses his opinions with reservations and calmly.
A curiosity is that, in the experiments performed by Dunning and Kruger, they found that
the ones that are the actual experts lean towards underestimating their abilities, because
they know enough to know that there’s still a lot to know. The problem is that, in the end,
the simpleton tends to win the popular vote, because he was so confident about being
right during the debate and people tend to trust certainty. When applied to areas such as
politics and climate change, the perils appear. Strong opinions expressed with anger and
extreme determination generally swallow the more contained, scientific and reason-based
arguments.

7) But don’t worry: not everything is lost. Even though there is no straightforward way to
overcome the Dunning-Kruger effect, one good strategy is to always look for feedback
from others. This way, we get an external sense of how well we’re doing at something -
in other words, an indirect opinion can help avoid the bias of overinflated
self-assessments. And with that we arrive at the end of this video. I hope you enjoyed and
thanks for watching!