The challenge of knowledge miscalibration
Lack of intellectual humility, manifested as knowledge miscalibration and overconfidence, is a particularly difficult issue to tackle. Higher perceptions of understanding are associated with higher reported certainty about one's attitudes (Fernbach, Rogers, Fox, and Sloman, 2013; Long et al., 2018).
In the absence of salient information disproving what is perceived to be high knowledge, perceived high knowledge can lead to even more overconfidence, a phenomenon Alba and Hutchinson (1987) call “a cycle of self-delusion.” It is also more difficult for people with objectively lower knowledge of a domain (or who are novices) to assess what it is they do not know, and as a result, they are poorer at evaluating their knowledge compared to individuals with objectively higher knowledge (or who are experts) (Dunning, 2011; Kruger and Dunning, 1999). According to Dunning and Kruger,“people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do [they] reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it” (Kruger and Dunning, 1999, p. 1121).Independent of someone's expertise (or lack thereof) in a domain, knowledge miscalibration is a pervasive challenge. Recent research on information processing and judgment formation has found that people believe that they and others sample and consider more evidence before making up their minds on goods, services, and people than they do in reality (Klein and O'Brien, 2018). Klein and O'Brien (2018) argue that because people consume far less information than expected before evaluating things, they misjudge how quickly impressions form and change, which means that significant time, money, words, and effort is wasted on people who have already made up their minds. Beyond what could be called innocent scenarios of limited information processing, there are also less innocent ones: sometimes people deliberately choose to be ignorant in order not to feel the emotions associated with some information, maintain fairness, or avoid liability, for example (Hertwig and Engel, 2016).
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