All of my time at the moment seems to be dominated with promoting the new Channel 4 series that I filmed with Emilia Fox called In the Footsteps of Killers, the first episode of which goes out on 7 June, talking about my next book A Plot to Kill, or putting the finishing touches to BBC Scotland’s David Wilson ’s Crime Files.
It’s obviously a busy time and it has meant that I find myself speaking with journalists, podcasters, critics and print and online reviewers, and being driven in cars to different radio and TV studios to talk about the issues behind the book, or to describe the stories that will feature in the two TV series – many of which can be described as “cold cases”.
Events in Gloucester have clearly added to people’s interest in cold cases because, of course, it was a TV production company filming a documentary about Fred and Rose West that first alerted the police to what they might have found in the basement of a local café.
You may even have seen me discussing this on This Morning with Phillip Schofield and Holly Willoughby.
I started to count the numbers of people that I had spoken with and then gave up when I reached 50 – life’s too short, and I am describing all of this background to you not because of the 49 who were polite and interested, and who had read the materials provided about the TV programmes or the book, but because of one person who, well, to put it mildly, has stuck in my memory.
This one person, who will remain nameless, had read all the materials that had been given to him, and was polite and engaged.
That’s not why he lingers in my memory. Instead he had become so immersed in these materials that he believed that he himself had become an expert and, rather than listen to my opinion, spoke at length with seemingly great authority about what he had come to believe was central to the cases that we feature. I was merely there to endorse the views that he had come to – many of which, perhaps that should be most of which, were well-wide of the mark.
You will have encountered this phenomenon in your own lives, whether you are a plumber, or a nurse; an electrician or a teacher – that someone who doesn’t know very much about your profession wants to tell you how to do your job, despite the fact that their knowledge about your work is limited and partial.
In fact, this is a psychological phenomenon and has the marvellous name of “The Dunning-Kruger Effect”. This suggests that if you have very little knowledge about a subject you are nonetheless more likely to have high (and misplaced) confidence in your understanding and judgement on that subject because your ignorance is often invisible to you.
A less academic way of putting this is that some people simply overestimate their own ability. In other words, it is a cognitive bias of illusory superiority, despite the person experiencing that bias having lower ability than an expert but, nevertheless, a greater willingness to offer an opinion.
This is sometimes humourlessly described as talking from the summit of “Mount Stupid”.
David Dunning and Justin Kruger are American social psychologists who first introduced this concept in 1999 in a paper called “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”.
Since then this concept has been useful in explaining all kinds of “real world” issues such as when our work colleagues think that they are performing a task well, but in actual fact are doing it rather badly, or it might simply explain why someone always agrees a specific time to meet up but is invariably late – they overestimate their ability to plan and then stick to a schedule, but are ignorant of that defect in their personality.
I find the Dunning-Kruger Effect a useful way of explaining why people develop, and then confidently state as “truth” what are in fact conspiracy theories – you know that Princess Diana was murdered by our security services (or Prince Phillip – I can never remember); that 5G caused COVID-19; or that an international human trafficking and paedophile ring, working from a pizza restaurant in Washington DC was closely associated with the Democratic party and secretly running the world.
That seems utterly far-fetched, but was such a strongly held belief that in December 2016 Edgar Maddison from North Carolina drove to Washington and fired three shots from his AR-15 rifle inside the restaurant which, thankfully, only hit the wall and the door of a storage area where children were supposedly being held. It was actually a staff cloakroom.
We can also use more clinical language to describe people experiencing the Dunning-Kruger Effect: we could say that they have grandiose delusions, that they are narcissistic, or that their personality is dominated by hubris - extreme or excessive pride.
Overcoming this effect involves helping people to learn more about the subject areas that they have previously talked about from the summit of Mount Stupid - so that they are able to begin to identify what it is that they don’t know and therefore the gaps that they have in their knowledge.
Of course I have to be aware that I too might be talking nonsense. So I know that I deliberately try and challenge my own assumptions that I have taken for granted for some time, continue to read all that I can on a subject and often play devil’s advocate with myself. Above all I take criticism seriously.
All that I having been said, I am pretty certain that this one man who wanted to tell me all about Criminology was on Mount Stupid and, after a few futile attempts to offer a correction to his theories, I simply gave up! I am now dreading his review, although that at least will help you to identify him.
- Channel 4’s In the Footsteps of Killers begins on Monday 7th June at 9pm
