Dunning-Kruger But for Smart People

Smart people may be dumber than dumb people, because they have access to more ways to fool themselves and overestimate their understanding.

You might be familiar with the Dunning-Kruger effect: unskilled people overestimate their abilities because they lack awareness of their incompetence. But there’s a subtler cousin that specifically targets smart people: intellectual overconfidence.

Here’s how intellectual overconfidence works:

• Smart people quickly grasp new ideas, drawing connections between concepts. This rapid understanding can lead to a false sense of mastery. They think they see the full landscape clearly, even when their perspective is limited.
• They outsource their beliefs to experts, assuming those experts must have taken as much care in their field as they would in their own field.
• They underestimate the complexity of subjects outside their expertise because they easily master other areas.
• They mistake eloquence for correctness.
• They dismiss the opinions of less articulate or less obviously smart individuals, assuming their perspectives are less valid.

Intellectual overconfidence happens because intelligence makes it easy to form plausible explanations. When you effortlessly generate reasonable-sounding theories, it becomes harder to question yourself.

This blind spot is dangerous. It leads to decisions built on incomplete information, confidently justified by smart-sounding logic.

How do you avoid this trap?

Embrace uncertainty. Smart people often avoid admitting ignorance. Or they may admit there are a few details left to understand. But acknowledging what you don’t understand is often the smartest move of all.