A little learning is a dang'rous thing;
Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring:
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
In my youth, I never shied away from an argument. I’d jump on top of any comment I disagreed with. I associated argumentativeness with intelligence; being right was important. It used to really annoy my sisters during family dinners.
I’ve recently tried to soften my approach at the dinner table. You learn more by listening, by not being right. It’s the opposite of what our culture tells us. Our news feeds are filled with talking heads, pundits, experts, thought leaders, and influencers. The loudest, most confident voices get the most followers.
With an abundance of information at our disposal, perhaps we can be forgiven for being know-it-alls. With a quick Google search, I can tell you about the construction of the CN Tower or the migratory patterns of the Monarch butterfly. However, as I tell my students all the time, copy-pasting from Wikipedia is no indication of knowledge or capability. In fact, it’s quite the opposite. We’re basically outsourcing our brains to a computer.
Most information is noise. We often make the mistake of thinking that more information is always better. The opposite is true: Less information enables us to identify the signal more easily. Too much information can trick us into thinking we know more than we do.
You’ve probably heard of the Dunning-Kreuger effect, which states that (according to Wikipedia) “people with low ability at a task overestimate their ability” (“Dunning-Kruger”). It’s often used as an explanation for why there are so many incompetent people and why those people are so arrogant.
It’s also a warning for ourselves. As David Dunning cautioned in a recent interview, the Dunning-Kruger Effect “is a phenomenon that visits all of us sooner or later…the problem with it is we see it in other people, and we don’t see it in ourselves” (Resnick). It’s easy to spot the stupid in other people, much more difficult to recognize it in ourselves. Most of the time we just don’t see the gaps in our competence.
This is largely because our ability to recognize the gaps comes from competence. As Dunning and Kruger note in their study, “the skills that engender competence in a particular domain are the very same skills necessary to evaluate competence in that domain” (Dunning and Kruger, 1121). In other words, we can only assess our competence when we become more competent. As a result, confidence decreases, and it hurts to realize that we are not as good as we thought we were.
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Perhaps this is why many never progress past the beginner stage, and why we stop trying new things as we get older. As professional painter and art educator Lynne Ryall noted on a recent episode of the podcast: adults are terrified of painting or drawing something that looks bad. Nobody wants to feel incompetent.
But what if being bad at something was good for us? The only way to get better at something is to keep doing it until we stop sucking. In order to improve we have to recognize our own need for improvement. In other words, we have to be aware of how much we suck, how incompetent we are, and let this motivate us to improve.
Indeed, humility is good for learning. The humbler one is the more one learns. It makes sense: recognizing the limits of your knowledge is the first step to expanding those limits. Research indicates that intellectually humble individuals exhibit characteristics conducive to learning, such as curiosity, open-mindedness, metacognition (the ability to think about thinking), and intrinsic motivation. This study sums it up: “simply put, learning requires the humility to realize one has something to learn” (Krumrei-Mancuso et. al.). Humility encourages learning, which leads to greater competence.
Intellectual Humility is the recognition of all that we don’t know and acceptance of our fallibility. It is openness to new ideas and information, including that which opposes our worldview. It is the ability to see things from others’ perspectives and the willingness to revise our own script. These are all traits we admire in others, but ones that are difficult to practice ourselves. I know, just ask my family.
Humble people learn more. I’ve seen it in my students. A hunger for criticism, asking “what can I do better?”, leads to improvement. One of the reasons people fail to recognize their incompetence is a lack of negative feedback; further, it’s more difficult to ascertain the causes of failure than success (Dunning and Kruger, 1131).
This is where the help of experienced practitioners is so valuable. Good teachers provide negative feedback and identify the causes of failure in students, what we often call “constructive criticism”. We avoid negative feedback because it makes us feel uncomfortable, but as author Mark Ryall noted on a recent episode of the podcast, (quoting Hellen Keller) “security is mostly a superstition”. No matter how difficult, it’s important to recognize our shortcomings, learn from them, and try again.
Humility encourages us to learn from our fellow humans. To paraphrase Ralph Waldo Emerson, every person I meet is my superior in some way, and in that I learn from them (Emerson, 313). As I always say, there’s a teacher in everyone you meet!
I’ve discovered from my interviews that good learners seek out teachers. They go to night school (sorry dad, it’s not a sign of stupidity), find mentors on YouTube, observe skilled practitioners in action, and read voraciously about their passions. They aren’t afraid to compare themselves with others, another habit that can help us overcome the Dunning-Kruger effect (Dunning and Kruger, 1131). Their hunger for improvement outweighs the discomfort of failure or “looking bad”. Consequently, these individuals escape the beginner trap and achieve competence.
A little competence is a dangerous thing. We can get drunk on feeling good about ourselves, or we can push ourselves to learn more, to know more, to be better. Though uncomfortable, the latter is far more rewarding in the long run. Just like sobering up.
(p.s. Happy New Year!!!)
References
“Dunning-Kruger Effect.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation. 2 December 2021, 07:13 (UTC), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunning–Kruger_effect
Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Letters and Social Aims. Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1904. Google Books. https://books.google.ca/books?id=7kMLAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&hl=fr&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false
Kruger, Justin, and David Dunning. "Unskilled and Unaware of it: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments." Journal of personality and social psychology 77.6 (1999): 1121-34. ProQuest. Web. 14 Nov. 2021.
Krumrei-Mancuso, Elizabeth J., Megan C. Haggard, Jordan P. Labouff, and Wade C. Rowatt. “Links Between Intellectual Humility and Acquiring Knowledge.” The Journal of Positive Psychology 15.2 (2020): 155-170. Taylor & Francis Online. Web. 14 Nov. 2021. DOI: 10.1080/17439760.2019.1579359
Resnick, Brian. “An expert on human bling spots gives advice on how to think.” Vox (June 26, 2019). <https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/1/31/18200497/dunning-kruger-effect-explained-trump> Web. 14 Nov. 2021.