How to Navigate the ‘Know it All' Family Member at Christmas Dinner -The Scientific DK effect

We have all been there and experienced the heated arguments that ensue around dinner tables, which is part of any family discourse. The only ‘normal’ families are the ones you don’t know that well.

I grew up with two uncles that both thought they knew more than each other on every subject, from sport to lawnmowers, car engines and fuel efficiency, geography and physics.

Both were loud mouths and so confident in what they knew it was stressful to watch. Two opinionated blowhards debating the most inane of topics. One would make a statement about something and that would ignite hours of debate about that topic and others that would get dragged in during the ensuing babble.

It was like a real life journey into a Youtube search, where you start off looking at how to build a wall and end up 3 hours later learning to speak giraffe. The only difference was that instead of clicking on Youtube videos, we all would get a guided tour by uncle ‘know all’ and uncle ‘know more’.

Later in life, I came to understand a psychological phenomenon known as the Dunning Kruger effect, defined as:

“Dunning-Kruger effect, in psychology, a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers or of people in general”

source: https://www.britannica.com/science/Dunning-Kruger-effect

The Dunning Kruger effect is a bias that all of us suffer from in some aspects of our lives, because none of us knows everything. This effect today is harder to recognise because we live in the age of information. Many people, myself included, can mistake information for knowledge and wisdom. We gain a sort of artificial intelligence from google.

While suffering from the Dunning Kruger effect, we cannot recognise that we are under it’s spell when it occurs. There are two reasons for this, we have low self-awareness and we have low cognitive ability.

Unless we profess to know everything about everything (Dunning Kruger), there is always something that we have a low cognitive ability in, for instance, a mathematical understanding of cosmological hypotheses. I could google it and even try to understand it after googling it, but an in-depth knowledge of the mathematics involved means that even though I may think I understand it. I don’t.

Overestimating our knowledge of something is classic Dunning Kruger syndrome.

Using that same example above, cosmologists tell us that 95% of the universe is comprised of dark matter and dark energy, but nobody knows what these entities are? So even though cosmologists may understand everything about current cosmology, they still only understand a percentage of 5% of the universe. This should humble us all.

Makes us laypeople all feel really silly when we look at it in this context. But it also highlights that any cosmologist who claims to know everything about the universe is suffering the same fate, namely the Dunning Kruger effect.

Being blind to our own foolishness is classic Dunning Kruger.

Often, when we first embark on studying something that we think we know a little about, we realise just how little we know about that subject when we delve deeply into it. A little knowledge, as they say, is a dangerous thing.

A comical definition of specialization is learning more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing. There are people who spend their whole working life studying one tiny part of a human cell, such as the mitochondria, and still they don’t fully understand it. Are you humbled yet?

‘They know they don’t know’

There are some comical sayings linked directly to the DK effect. ‘They know they don’t know’ this is when we realize our lack of knowledge, and is essentially the way out of the DK effect.

‘You don’t know what you don’t know’

This is DK in full swing, when we are unaware of what we don’t know.

In real life, the ‘DK’ effect can play out in usual family discourse. Going back to my two uncles that I mentioned above. Nobody could ever challenge them about what they claimed to know.

They knew it all, according to them they had studied it all, and you could never sway them by any ‘so -called facts.’

They were unaware that they were ignorant; they carried on spewing forth nonsense. This was very frustrating. I used to ask rather detailed questions, and that sometimes worked to shut them up, but not always. I was merely trying to shine a light on what they didn’t know, if it was a subject that I knew something about, lest I suffer the same fate as them.

What else did Dunning and Kruger find out?

Dunning and Kruger were two social psychologist researchers who found that people who scored rather low in grammar and humour and logic had a tendency to overestimate their performance, thinking they fared way better than they actually did.

They also noticed that poor performers could not recognise just how poor their work actually was. They even underestimated the knowledge and expertise of others.

Most times, they found that people who were incompetent had a false sense of confidence that they perceived as real. Being a lot more confident in the subject at hand than their actual performance warranted.

The opposite effect was also true that people who were competent or knowledgeable in certain areas underscored their ability, thinking they were less competent than they were. This is also part of the DK effect. The competent people realised through all their hard work just how much they didn’t know and didn’t realise that amongst their peers that they were very competent.

This DK effect can affect many parts of life, where people who are competent can choose not to pursue career paths in which they could flourish. Some may also decide to pursue a career and waste time and money trying to pursue something they are not competent at. This can have profound effects on our lives, so we would be wise to be mindful of this.

Dunning Kruger went further in their research and asked respondents about subjects like biology, politics, geography and even physics. They then made up terms. In one study, about 90 percent of the respondents said that they were familiar with the made up terms.

The conundrum that confronted Dunning and Kruger was they found that the same skills required to be a good at a task were also the same skills required to realise that they were not good at that skill.

The above results in the family ‘know all, loud mouth, blow hard’ at every family dinner table. If your family does not have one, count yourself lucky, and just for the record, I recognize in the past that may in fact have been me… Cringe….

So how do we overcome this DK effect that can affect us all?

We can be humble in the first place and admit that we don’t know everything about a subject. Then we can continue to learn a subject or a skill and as we dig deeper, we will come to realise just how little we knew.

We can also get feedback from others if we are humble and brave enough to accept honest criticism, and this is how we grow and learn.

Let us question what we know, why we think it’s true and find out if it really is true, rather than just listening to talking heads or adopting slogans of people that we think we agree with, let’s find out, uncover if what we believe is true.

Let’s look hard at what we think is true and find out what others know and why they disagree with us. Dig deeper into discussion with those who disagree with us. We may just find they know more than us. That means we can learn, it’s ok to be wrong.