The Dunning-Kruger effect is something I've experienced/experience in multiple domains in my life and I use to try to check myself when I'm feeling overly confident and feel like I know it all . I also try to make sure new learners I work with are aware of it because we don't want to lose them in the Valley of Despair in their learning journey.
Dunning-Kruger effect, in psychology, a cognitive bias whereby people with limited knowledge or competence in a given intellectual or social domain greatly overestimate their own knowledge or competence in that domain relative to objective criteria or to the performance of their peers or of people in general.
Y-Axis: Confidence
- Diving in early our spongy brains want to absorb all sorts of details about something new -- find the patters -- make things make sense -- learn the new vocabulary. Gain enough understanding of the domain to engage with it successfully -- gaining confidence. I KNOW EVERYTHING A wonderful gift we want people to achieve.
- We start to dig deep enough in we run into the problem of finally understanding just how much we don't understand and we hit the Valley of Despair hard. This is the hard part to slog through and keep trying to put things back together again in a useful way so you understand the deeper complexities of the domain.
- Slowly confidence returns but never quiet as clean and crisp feeling as the early days .. continued learning and application brings competence without significant gains in confidence ... it sort of a plateaus where an expert who has amassing deeper understanding and competence but may not be feeling or acting more confident than one who is still on the peak of confidence and knows it.
X-Axis: Competence
- We hope that rapid rise of Confidence stays as a timeline but some folks never bother getting past the "I know Everything" .. they get stuck there thinking they know it and don't really dig deep enough in / listen to experts (because they know it all) to learn how much they don't know ... meaning they never develop any real competence in the domain.