Insight: Why We Are Less Self-Aware Than We Think—and What to Do About It

by Tasha Eurich

Professor David Dunning (who first showed us that the least competent people are the most confident) has spent most of his career trying to understand why we’re so terrible at evaluating our own performance. Though there is admittedly no satisfying single explanation, Dunning and his colleague Joyce Ehrlinger uncovered the powerful influence of something they call “top-down thinking” (I call it Knowledge Blindness)—which is our first blindspot. In a series of studies, they discovered that the opinions we have about our abilities in specific situations are based less on how we perform and more on the general beliefs we have about ourselves and our underlying skills.