In self-judgment, the "best option illusion" leads to Dunning-Kruger (failure to recognize our own incompetence). In social judgment, it leads to the Cassandra quandary (failure to identify when another person’s competence exceeds our own)

The best option illusion in self and social assessment. David Dunning. Self and Identity, https://doi.org/10.1080/15298868.2018.1465460

Abstract: I discuss the best option illusion, the tendency for people to select what they believe is the most reasonable option when solving problems or deciding on a course of action. Such a strategy is straightforward, sensible and difficult to quibble with, but occasionally the seemingly best option turns out to be anything but—leading to systematic errors and problems that must be identified, addressed, and managed. Specifically, people are more likely to be surprised in a negative direction than a positive one, give themselves positive credit for wrong answers, and stick to their answers far more than they should after exposure to contrary evidence. In self-judgment, the illusion leads to the Dunning-Kruger effect, in which people fail to recognize their own incompetence. In social judgment, it leads to the Cassandra quandary, in which people fail to identify when another person’s competence exceeds their own.

Keywords: Self-assessment, confidence, overconfidence, Dunning-Kruger effect, social judgment

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The Cassandra bias is that people often have adequate expertise to accurately recognize true incompetence among their peers, in that the competence of anyone who chooses differently from the self is suspect. However, people fail to have adequate expertise to reliably identify peers who demonstrate superior experience. In short, when highly competent people choose differently from the self, those differences are, again, read as potential incompetence when they really reflect the exact opposite (Dunning, 2018c). In sum, people often lack the competence necessary to recognize competence or excellence that outstrips their own. They fail to have the virtuosity necessary to recognize a true virtuoso. As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle put it, in the guise of his famous character Sherlock Holmes, mediocrity recognizes nothing above itself. As a consequence, the best and the brightest often hide in plain sight.

In recent work, we have shown that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle is right. Study participants take tests in logical reasoning, numerical reasoning, financial literacy, or chess expertise, for example, and then are asked to assess the performances of other people chosen to represent gross incompetence to perfect skill. Respondents are relatively good at judging poor performers, overestimating the performance of the worst two performers they see by roughly 15%. However, they underestimate the top two performers they see by almost twice that—29% (Dunning & Cone, 2018). The degree of this underestimation was so profound that if converted to a metaphorical IQ scale, the very top performer in each study is judged to be operating at only an IQ of 104 for that particular skill, when in fact that person operates at a skill-specific level near a “genius” IQ of 134.

Participants in these studies also have more difficulty identifying top performers than bottom ones. In a study about financial literacy, participants were asked which of their peers they would approach for financial advice. Participants chose the person with a perfect score on a financial literacy quiz only 29% of the time, whereas they correctly identified the worst performer as the one to avoid 43% of the time. In another study, participants were asked to spot the worst or the best performer out of a group of three individuals. The skill was “global literacy,” and the peers being judged had completed a 12-item quiz on world affairs.Participants were quite good at spotting bad performers. When looking over a group in which two people scored 5 of the quiz and the last scored only 1, participants accurately identified the worst performer roughly 72% of the time. However, when the task was spotting the good performer, an entirely different picture emerged. When looking over a group in which one person had scored 11 on the quiz and the other two only 7, participants accurately identified the best performer only 25% of the time (Dunning & Cone, 2018).

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But the most ironic set of judgments came from the study done on chess, which examined what could happen when the Cassandra quandary runs up against the Dunning-Kruger effect. High expert participants, those who did well on a quiz about chess strategy and also sported the highest official United States Chess Federation ratings, seemed largely sensible in their judgments about peers they could beat. When they looked over a peer who had done horribly on the chess quiz, they were absolutely certain they could beat that peer, but were only 50–50 about whether they could beat a peer who aced the quiz. Low expert participants, however, provided a set of estimates that did not seem so reasonable. They were only 60% sure they could beat the worst performing peer, but 70% sure they could beat the peer who aced the quiz. In short, they were more confident they could beat a peer showing a near grandmaster mind than did other participants who actually knew a good deal about chess (Dunning & Cone, 2018).


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