GANDANG-GANDA sa sarili (finding oneself extremely beautiful). Gwapong-gwapo sa sarili (finding oneself extremely handsome). We know a few of these, and I am guessing we don’t hold them in esteem.
This column, however, will talk about a different GGSS—galing na galing sa sarili (finding oneself brilliant). I am also guessing we know quite a few personally (and a lot more in the news), and I will point out that this latter group poses more danger to society than just those who are simply delusional about their physical attributes.
It turns out, being GGSS is backed by hard science. Didn’t Charles Darwin say “ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge?”
A pair of psychologists from Cornell University, Justin Kruger and David Dunning, conducted four studies that showed the relationship between incompetence and one’s ability to evaluate one’s competence. The research was published in 1999 in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology of the American Psychological Association.
The study’s title—Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Self-inflated Assessments—is pretty self-explanatory. The authors found that incompetent people fall into a double trap: they reach mistaken conclusions and make regrettable errors, and their incompetence robs them of the ability to realize it. This is because the skills that engender competence in a particular domain are often the very same skills needed to evaluate competence in that domain.
Indeed, ignorance, or incompetence, is bliss!
To test their theory, Kruger and Dunning conducted four experiments. They asked participants to take tests that measured their humor, logical reasoning and grammar. And then, they asked the same participants to rate their own performance: “I’m at the very bottom,” “I’m exactly average,” and “I’m at the very top.”
Across all four tests, the authors found that those who ranked at the bottom percentile always estimated that they did better than they actually did, saying they were generally above average.
For example, read this tweet from a prominent international figure: “Actually, throughout my life, my two greatest assets have been mental stability and being, like, really smart… I went from VERY successful businessman, to top T.V. Star.… to [the current office he holds] on my first try. I think that would qualify as not smart, but genius….and a very stable genius at that!”
Initials—DJT. Then again we don’t need to be geniuses to figure that out.
The reason? Less-skilled participants lack meta-cognitive skills—the ability to know how well one is performing, when one is likely to be accurate in judgment, and when one is likely to be in error.
The solution is a paradox. “One way to make people recognize their incompetence is to make them competent…once they gained the meta-cognitive skills to recognize their own incompetence, they were no longer incompetent,” said the authors.
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At the other end of the spectrum is the impostor syndrome.
Contrary to the name, those who have it are not impostors at all—they just feel that way. The term, coined in 1978, is a “feeling of phoniness in people who believe that they are not intelligent, capable or creative despite evidence of high achievement.” It is a sense of inadequacy despite evident success.
Not all high performers suffer from impostor syndrome. Most just do not have a need to flaunt how good they are. In “How Actual Smart People Talk About Themselves,” published this month in The Atlantic, James Fallows talks about having interviewed a number of brilliant people. He said these achievers know too well what they bring to the table: “A lifetime of quietly comparing their ease in handling intellectual challenges—at the chess board, in the classroom, in the debating or writing arena—with the efforts of other people gave them the message.”
Despite this awareness, none of them need to go around announcing how good they are.
Perhaps the real hallmark that sets intelligent people from the others is the acknowledgment that they don’t know everything—a disposition completely opposite to the poor performers in the Kruger-Dunning study. They know what they don’t know. “The more acute someone’s ability to perceive and assess, the more likely that person is to recognize his or her limits. These include the unevenness of any one person’s talents; the specific areas of weakness—social awkwardness, musical tin ear, being stronger with numbers than with words, or vice versa; and the incomparable vastness of what any individual person can never know,” Fallows said.
For those who do feel inadequate despite their competence, Ashley Stahl, writing in Forbes, has some advice: Acknowledge disruptive thoughts when they emerge; you will have an easier time overcoming it. Reframe your thoughts and realize that the feelings of inadequacy are all in your head. Tell yourself that you are not perfect, and in fact, nobody is. Take stock of your achievements, and remember you are not alone. Many other competent individuals struggle with this conflict.
Perhaps it is easier to advise those who feel inadequate despite their competence than those who feel so good about themselves despite evidence to the contrary. These are the real GGSS. Because they do not know that they do not know, it might be a challenge to find humility and a willingness to improve themselves. They could be defensive and arrogant when you criticize them or make suggestions.
As always, the middle way appears the best way. We should aim for a healthy dose of confidence in our abilities but also some humility that we do not have all the answers, that we could be fallible, and that learning does not end.