Opinion Analysis by Elie El Hajj, Contributor

July 29th, 2020

Are you as good as you think you are? Really? Well that’s interesting. How good are you with your money? What about reading people’s emotions? Is your grammar above average? 

At this point you’re probably asking why is he posing all these questions? Knowing how competent we are and how our skills stack up well against other people is often more than a self-esteem boost. It helps us in figuring out when we can forge ahead on our own decisions and instincts, and when we need instead to seek advice. A concept sadly and evidently missing in our Lebanese culture – because we already know everything possible present in the universe, right?

Effectively, psychological research suggests that we are not very good at evaluating ourselves accurately. In fact, we overestimate our own abilities, nothing new for a brave Lebanese citizen. Researchers have a name for this phenomenon: the Dunning Krueger Effect. We judge ourselves as better than others to a degree that violates the laws of math. An experience that was conducted by Ted Talks at a software engineering company asked the employees to rate themselves based on their daily competence. 32% of these employees ranked themselves as the top 5% of the company workers. Now what’s really interesting is that those with the least ability are often the most likely to overrate their skills to the greatest extent. So, who’s the most vulnerable to these decisions? 

Sadly, most of us.  We all have pockets of incompetence we don’t recognize. It goes without saying that we Lebanese people are surely the best at it. When writing this article, I tried to remember if I ever heard a simple “I don’t know”- never happened. This is the outcome of living in a society that considers any sort of lacking to be a symbol of weakness. People lacking skills in a specific area suffer a double curse. First, they make mistakes and reach poor decisions, but secondly, those same knowledge gaps also prevent them from catching errors

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The Dunning Krueger effect isn’t a question of our ego blinding us to our weaknesses. People do admit their deficits, of course once they can spot them. In Lebanon the situation is a bit different. Try asking your father something related to cars or driving, he will answer every single question without even thinking if what he said is right or wrong. Try asking him about how to bake a cake, he will simply tell you “Go ask your mom” unfortunately. Sometimes he might even add to it “Go ask your mom but I am sure it’s not that hard”. This is a direct message from our society telling us; yes, sir you live in a place where the only things a man shouldn’t know are the things that doesn’t add up to boosting his masculinity according to our current stereotypes and status quo. Many find this totally absurd, but hey remember, we are the leading country in education and general knowledge in the Middle East. People with a high level of expertise often have less confidence in their abilities. They know enough to know that there is a lot they don’t know. 

Meanwhile, experts tend to be aware of just how knowledgeable they are, they make a different mistake, they assume that everyone else is knowledgeable too. Well guess what, here in Lebanon we experience the total opposite. The people that know the less think they know the most and suppose that the knowledge of others doesn’t compare to them. This phenomenon is called the Lebanese Dunning Krueger effect. This is an inexhaustible debate, yet on a last note keep the following sentence in mind, when arguing with a fool make sure that the other person isn’t doing the same.