How good of a driver are you? Pretty good? Pretty great? Maybe the next Jeff Gordon, if you only had some training and a jumped-up Chevy? Well, perhaps -- but probably not, and you’ll probably never know.

It’s difficult, almost impossible, for us to accurately evaluate our competencies. So says David Dunning, Ph.D., professor of psychology at Cornell University and author of several books and papers on accuracy and illusion in human judgment.

Dr. Dunning focuses on the difference between people’s perceptions of their abilities and reality -- a gap that can make all the difference in business. Why? Because our own incompetencies blind us to our incompetence. Employees are often asked to tackle something new at work; some will excel while others will fail. Is there a way to predict that failure in advance and avoid it? Furthermore, decision makers must have confidence in their fundamental ability to do their job, but when that confidence is misplaced, even once, the whole organization can suffer. Most business missteps and mistakes are essentially errors in judgment of judgment.

There are ways, however, to objectively evaluate your competence before you fall on your face. In this interview, Dr. Dunning discusses how to work around blind spots, how to make critiques more effective, and what to do when a coworker fails to accurately assess his or her competence.

GMJ: Why do people tend to overestimate their abilities?

Dr. Dunning: There are many, many reasons. The first is the spin we tend to give the feedback we receive about ourselves from the outside world. That is, we claim credit for our successes and lay blame for our failures elsewhere. Second, what people tell you to your face is never exactly what they’re saying behind your back. That will give you an inaccurate idea of your abilities. And finally, people just don’t have all the information they need to be able to see themselves accurately, and what they miss tends to leave them overconfident.

When we’re incompetent, we’re not often in a position to recognize that incompetence. Often we make errors of omission because we’re not aware of how we could have done a task in a better or a different way. But because we are unaware of these alternatives, we think instead that we’ve done just fine.

So there are just a whole host of reasons why people generally, but not always, are left with a sense of confidence that may not be justified.

GMJ: There's a lot of research into gender differences in self-appraisal of competence. For example, some research shows that men tend to overrate and women under-rate their ability to pick stocks. Both views are inaccurate, though. Is that same gender dichotomy true in other aspects?

Dunning: No. At least in American culture, you find that both genders tend to be overconfident, but the tendency will differ depending on what area of life you’re talking about. So it may be true that men are overconfident about their ability to pick stocks, but if you move to, say, knowledge about literature or aesthetics, the gender difference may go away or reverse.

If you take a look at teenage kids, boys will be more positive and overconfident in their ability to deal with science than girls are. But if you move to English, that gender bias goes away. In the North American culture, if there’s going to be a bias that people on average tend to have, it’s to be overconfident, though that obviously doesn’t happen all the time. And that’s not necessarily true in other cultures.

GMJ: What’s the danger of being overconfident? What’s wrong with being wrong?

Dunning: There are some areas where it could be right to be wrong, but I think we all can easily imagine areas where overconfidence can certainly get you into trouble. I wouldn’t want to be an overconfident gambler. I wouldn’t want to be an overconfident airplane pilot. I wouldn’t want to be a doctor who doesn’t know when he or she has to call in a specialist for a consult.

There are a number of areas where overplaying your expertise can have bad effects for you and the people around you. Now there might be some areas, and I think this is underexplored in psychology, where being overconfident and being unrealistic may actually be helpful. Those areas tend to be where people are facing the extremes of life -- like you’re putting your life together after your country has gone through a civil war, or you’re facing a cancer diagnosis.

Copyright Ó 2007 The Gallup Organization, Princeton, NJ.  All rights reserved.  Reprinted with permission.  Visit The Gallup Management Journal at http://gmj.gallup.com/

Article from The Gallup Management Journal