A Word to the Wise…
by Miki Saxon
is not always sufficient.
In 2008, the psychiatrist Stephen Greenspan published The Annals of Gullibility, a summary of his decades of research into how to avoid being gullible. Two days later, he discovered his financial advisor Bernie Madoff was a fraud,…
Why would an expert in gullibility be so gullible?
The answer, according to David Dunning, a University of Michigan social psychologist, is simple —
We are always most gullible to ourselves. (…) “To fall prey to another person you have to fall prey to your belief that you’re a good judge of character, that you know the situation, that you’re on solid ground as opposed to shifty ground,”
I read about Dunning’s research on incompetency way back in 2000, when he was at Cornell, and wrote about it in 2007, so learning how closely gullibility was related to incompetency made a great deal of sense to me.
A body of research has also established what scientists call “egocentric discounting”: If participants are asked to give an estimate of a particular fact, such as unemployment rate or city population, and then shown someone else’s estimate and asked if they’d like to revise their own, they consistently give greater weight to their own view than others’, even when they’re not remotely knowledgeable in these areas.
There lies the greatest danger, as well as the greatest challenge, for every manager when hiring outside of their own expertise — which is most of the time.
The easy part of the solution is to have team members with specific expertise included in the interview process.
The truly difficult part is to put aside your “egocentric discounting” and give credence to those more knowledgeable than yourself.
Image credit: ArrrRT eDUarD