The Perpetual Sophomore Effect

“The problem with the world is that the intelligent people are full of doubts,
while the stupid ones are full of confidence.”

~ Charles Bukowski ~

Any of us who have spent time in debates and/or discussions regarding any issue of substance for a significant amount of time have come across individuals who are simultaneously overconfident in their beliefs and incompetent in the subject matter. When this occurs, many of us become convinced that the person with which we are discussing is suffering from what has been popularly coined the "Dunning-Kruger Effect." I'd like to challenge this notion.

The Perpetual Sophomore Effect is a Different Curve from
the Popularized Dunning-Kruger Effect

Dunning-Kruger Effect

The actual Dunning-Kruger Effect (DKE) is described by David Dunning and Justin Kruger and has to do with observations that, on average, if you plot both self-perception of ability and actual test scores by level of experience, both test scores and perceived ability increase with experience. However, the two have different slopes. Those with lower competence tend to over-estimate their performance while those with the greatest competence tend to under-estimate their performance. The two lines cross between the first and second quartile, suggesting that all but the most skilled in a subject tend to over-estimate their performance on tests of knowledge.

The Dunning-Kruger Effect

In popular discussion, this effect has morphed into a generalized assessment of how people develop as they learn a new subject. In the popularized DKE (let's call this pDKE), students enthusiastically begin learning a subject, and they learn so much that they didn't know before that they quickly believe themselves to be very knowledgeable in the subject, but they lack an understanding of the complexities of the Subject. As they develop competency, they begin to appreciate how large and complex the subject matter is and their confidence drops as their competency continues to grow. Eventually, as their competence grows into being "experts" in their field, their confidence may grow to a level near where it was when they were new to the field, but their confidence now is more well-grounded.

In my view, this pDKE (without the labels) describes something that matches my own experience and my interactions with others. However, I have two issues with using this pDKE to describe interactions with those who are entrenched in a state of being simultaneously overconfident and incompetent in the subject matter. First, while there are obvious conceptual parallels with the DKE, these pDKE graphs go well beyond what is described. And second (and more important), these pDKE charts show what I would consider the normal development of people learning any subject. To one degree or another, we go through a process similar to what is described above. As we begin to learn a subject we are taught what is basically and generally true, but we often are not taught exceptions to general rules, the complexities and nuances involved, and the like. So our confidence increases before we learn just how complex the subject is. We then learn the irregularities, nuances, and complexities that cause us to become more humble about our subject, and then we grow in confidence and competence from there. This is normal development, but this is not the effect that we frequently encounter in debates in the public sphere.

Perpetual Sophomore Effect

We live in a world today in which social media curate the information we receive, and this can create a selection bias that can generate a sort of spotlight fallacy among those of us who get our information from social media. If we only read and evaluate what we're exposed to on social media, we become overly familiar with a smalls subset of available information, and that subset is curated by our own biases and the selection algorithms of social media to give us more information that confirms our beliefs and preferences and hides from us information that contradicts our beliefs and preferences. This can generate a confirmation bias so strong that our growth and development in a particular subject can stagnate. But while our competency stagnates, our confidence continues to grow as we are exposed to more and more information that reinforces our beliefs. We can become entrenched in an endless feedback loop in which we see more and more information confirming our biases and nothing that challenges them. This this can derail us from normal development described in pDKE graphs, and we essentially become perpetual sophomores (wise fools) in our chosen subject.

This is especially a problem when we become entrenched in patterns of curated information that reinforces counterfactual, conspiratorial and even nonsensical ideas. We can become so entrenched that we 1) rarely see corrections to our beliefs and biases, 2) immediately reject the corrections we do see, and 3) uncritically accept ideas that confirm what we already believe. Within this mindset, doing research will inevitably become indistinguishable from reading up on what your favorite bloggers, YouTubers and conspiracy theorists are saying. In today's world, it takes a fair amount of work to overcome this problem - we have to be actively critical of the information we see and also seek out broad sources of information in order to avoid what I'd like to call the "perpetual sophomore effect" (PSE).

In climate discussions, I frequently see people who are supremely confident in all sorts of concepts and ideas that run counter to basic physics, and frequently it becomes clear that they simply lack competence in scientific fields related to climate. Social media is filled with people claiming that the greenhouse effect is impossible because of the second law of thermodynamics, that further warming is impossible because CO2 is saturated in the atmosphere, that the planet is actually cooling despite what all GMST datasets are saying, etc. They may be very-well informed about these alternatives to sound scientific data and evidence, but they lack grounding in science, so they lack the skills they need to see the flaws in the alternatives they are so confident in. And this pattern doesn't change unless they are willing to jump out of their entrenched patterns and check their views against well-grounded scientific data and evidence. Until and unless they do, there is no way for them to jump off the PSE curve and onto the pDKE curve.

Conclusion

I don't know if the Perpetual Sophomore Effect is a good term; it's the best I've come up with so far. If you have any alternative names for this, feel free to suggest them in the comments. But I think we need to stop using Dunning-Kruger to describe those who are entrenched in being simultaneously overconfident and incompetent. This I believe is a different effect entirely - it may look very similar early on, but the PSE prevents normal development from occurring. There's no path to gaining humility with experience here. We have to learn to turn a skeptical eye towards ourselves, reevaluate our own assessment of our knowledge, and jump off the perpetual cycles reinforcing our confirmation biases to get out of the Perpetual Sophomore Effect and back on to a normal pDKE curve.