Recently I discovered a website that posts videos from "Ignite" events. In these events speakers are given 20 slides and 5 minutes to make their point. Their slogan is "Enlighten us, but make it quick." There is a video posted the is titled "The Psychology of Incompetence"." You can watch the video at: http://igniteshow.com/videos/psychology-incompetence.
What I found most interesting in his talk, was a point that he made at the end. If a person is not aware of his/her own incompetence, than he/she will not take steps to correct that incompetence.
In Reeve (2009) competence is defined as the "psychological need to be effective in interactions with the environment, and it reflects the desire to exercise one's capacities and skills and, in doing so, to seek out and master optimal challenges." But, if I were completely incompetent would I know? There is the possibility that one could incorrectly judge his/her effectiveness in interactions with the environment.
How, then, are we able to accurately measure our competence?
Cater and Dunning (2008) explored the above questions in a paper entitled "Faulty Self-Assessment: Why Evaluating One's Own Competence Is an Intrinsically Difficult Task" They argue that the reason our self-evaluations of our competence are divergent from our actual competence is due to the difficulty of self-evaluation. They go so far as to say that accurate self-evaluation is nearly impossible. This is due to our lacking information when we make our evaluation and we don't receive unbiased feedback from the environment. Carter and Dunning point out that if one is competent he/she will be more able to self-evaluate because he/she is more apt to find the information necessary and notice the feedback given. These, however, are not the people that we hope are learning that they are incompetent. Cater and Dunning, also make an interesting point that it is unfair to blame the individual for his/her faulty judgement on competence, because it is more often the fault of the environment.
It is interesting to note that our need for competence, is less a need to actually BE competent at something, as it is a need to BELIEVE we are competent at something. This is why we seek out the easier tasks to complete, the ones that we are sure we can do, just to show ourselves that we are competent.
The article discussed above can be found at: http://cornellpsych.org/sasi/papers/carter-dunning-self-assessment%20intrinsically%20difficult-PSPC-2008.pdf
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