“In the field of psychology, the Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which people mistakenly assess their [cognitive] ability as greater than it is. It is related to the cognitive bias of illusory superiority and comes from the inability of people to recognize their lack of ability.”
We’ve all met people like this, and we’ve all been those people. It’s where we all start when we begin to learn a skill. The challenge comes when we become convinced our knowledge is complete at any stage, but especially at an early stage when we are unable to more objectively assess our own ability.
A little bit of knowledge is a dangerous thing
Let’s start with an example.
Here is a scientific journal study asking a specific question:
Question: Is an individuals’ maximum bench press weight affected by doing the exercise on:
a) a solid traditional bench; vs
b) an inflatable ball.
The study concluded there was no difference in muscle activation between the two – i.e. benching on a bench vs swiss ball = no difference.
I showed this study to an Olympic and Commonwealth powerlifting coach I know. He understandably called the whole study “total b******t“.
Why is this nonsense?
In short, this coach said you only need consider the reality of the situation. With a very low weight, it may be a little tricky to balance but should be fine. But with any serious weight on the bar, e.g. 100kg for reps, it would likely be impossible to balance and stabilise your muscles enough to lift the weight safely.
Put simply, it makes zero practical sense for any moderately-skilled weightlifter to ask such a question.
If one had any meaningful real-world experience of weightlifting, to even ask whether a swiss ball and a bench could be equivalent for the bench press – let alone conduct an entire study and draw such a conclusion – is lacking in common sense. To the point that it begs the question whether the researchers are even qualified to operate as ‘experts’ in this field. And yet, they are peer-reviewed and published ‘experts’.
Bring it to the world of voice
One of the world’s best voice researchers said the following in relation to how he prepares for singing in church:
“What I do is I warm up the night before and I sleep a whole lot less. I take maybe three, four, five hours of sleep at the most.
I get up at four in the morning [for an 8am performance] and I start doing my lip trills and my straw phonation [warmups].”
While this may seem believable, just think about that for a moment: they choose to get 3-5 hours sleep at most, and spend up to 4 hours getting his voice warm for singing at church.
If you have ever done regular gigs (as opposed to just once every so often on a Sunday morning), it should be immediately apparent that this suggestion of reduced sleep is not a good thing. And if you need 4 hours to get your voice warmed up, it’s likely “warming up sufficiently” isn’t the problem.
Real-world singing and Dunning-Kruger
Generally, it’s not a lack of intelligence that leads to Dunning-Kruger. Often it’s very intelligent people who are prone to this kind of issue.
Rather, it’s a lack of the right kind of experience. A lack of appreciation of the wider contexts and nuances involved in the given field, coupled with insufficient experience of doing things a better way. Often, just being given the experience of doing things a better way is sufficient to nudge one out of that fallacious, self-assured mindset.
I regularly meet singers who make comments that reveal unjustified confidence in assessment of where they are at with their voice, and what they think they need to do in order to progress. This can be comments along the lines of “my voice is often shot after 10-20 minutes of singing, but that’s fairly normal“, or “I just need to hit it harder, I’ll be alright on the night“. I can assure you, such statements are only normal if a singer is regularly running their voice into the red every time they sing. If they could only feel a few gigs of NOT red-lining their voice, their view would spin on its axis.
Other instances are singers who, after just a few sessions, feel they know enough about their voice and the process generally to make fully informed decisions about what needs to happen next. I’ve even had beginner singers come in and direct ME as to what I should be doing differently with their voice.
If that were possible, then the study of singing and vocal development would be a shallow field of study indeed. If I could inject some of the years of experience I’ve garnered into their brains, they’d appreciate how fledgling their understanding is.
Take-home: No subject is digestible to a high level in short time-frames.
When you think “I’ve got it!” after just a short period of time performing a particular skill, that’s typically when Dunning-Kruger bites. You see improvement and know enough to know you’re getting somewhere, but nowhere near enough to objectively assess where you are at or what you need next.
Many beginners get stuck here. Worse still, a number go on to become coaches themselves, unwavering in their belief that they’ve got it all sorted.
In contrast, in any discipline, the most serious practitioners feel like they know less and less as they go on. This is because as they find out more about their chosen subject, the more they realise there is to learn and that they will never be done (as it happens, this is called ‘Impostor Syndrome‘).
“The more I learn, the more I realize how much I don’t know.” – Albert Einstein
This quote resonates immensely strongly with me. The more I learn, the more I feel like my knowledge becomes an increasingly smaller percentage of what there is left to learn. Nevertheless, this is essential to the process of being an eternal student. Whatever the subject, we’ve got to keep learning. The danger comes in becoming stagnant or overly self-assured, as that’s when we find ourselves in a cul-de-sac of our own making.
If you have been reading this and feel like you’ve got stuck in your own vocal development, and would like to get unstuck, I’d love to start work with you. You can book in your initial consultation via my booking form right here.