INDUSTRY NEWS LISA GILLESPIE Head of Learning and Development Make UK
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HR & RECRUITMENT
Lisa has been in the HR industry for 25 years in a number of roles. She holds qualifi cations in law, a post-graduate diploma in HRM, philosophy, psychology and creative writing. In addition she qualifi ed as a practitioner in PRINCE 2 and neurolinguistic programming.
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lgillespie@makeuk.org
Why am I surrounded by stupid people?
OH, I do love the human brain! This week I have been chortling at a video doing the rounds on social media which questions whether President Trump may be subject to the Dunning-Kruger Effect. Speculation has been happening online since he took office but I have noticed more recently that in HR people are becoming more interested in ‘imposter syndrome’ so it’s worthwhile pointing out it also has an evil twin: Dunning-Kruger.
What is it? Grab yourself a coffee and read on.
Let’s start with imposter syndrome. This is the tendency some people have to run their achievements down, consider
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themselves inadequate and be afraid of being ‘found out’ to be a fraud when they are not; a more complex version of what we generally call insecurity. At the extreme end of the spectrum you might have someone like Vincent Van Gogh. However, one can still fall well short of attacking your work with a knife or cutting off your ear and then dropping it off at a brothel and still be suffering from imposter syndrome. It’s probably good-ish if you are one of the most stunningly anguished creatives of all time but imposter syndrome is, in most cases, not a good state to find yourself in, even if you do produce some of your best work whilst suffering from it.
I much prefer the good old Dunning-Kruger
Effect, discovered in the 90s. Mr Dunning and his assistant (that’s Mr Kruger) found that students who were less competent at set tests had the tendency to overestimate their results, despite their scores placing them in the bottom percentile. On the other hand, students who performed better at these tests underestimated their results.
This probably wasn’t a new phenomenon, they simply gave it a name. I think William Shakespeare was probably the first to observe it when he wrote: ‘The fool thinks himself to be wise, while a wise man knows himself to be a fool’.
Should those of you who work in
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