Dunning-Kruger Effect & Hindsight Bias at Play

Throughout the years of human history, especially now in the age of technology where sharing information to one another is faster than it used to be, there have been instances of the Dunning-Kruger effect. We see this effect when individuals who don’t recognise their own abilities spread misinformation. They use schemas to make quick inferences and give responses to a topic they think they know more about than they really do. But if their inference is wrong, then their hindsight bias would come in and the individual will say, “I should have known that” or “I know that already.” In something like the Coronavirus, your intuition wants to say it’s just a flu because having that gut feeling telling you it’s a flu feels like it is something more; rather than looking at the actual facts about this virus. When they realize their knowledge of the situation was wrong, they won’t go back on their word but instead say, “I knew that already.” But why do individuals overestimate their abilities? This may be due to people’s egos at play and wanting to stand out from the rest. It is interesting to see this hypothetical cognitive bias at play and see how far an individual goes above and beyond on a topic they have no knowledge of in order to make their own self look knowledgeable. Would someone who thinks so highly of themselves be able to change if the true facts were laid out before them? Would exposing these individuals to the facts, criticisms of their actions, and showing the consequences of their actions allow them to change? Would someone who is narcissistic and not prone to change be able to change? The answer to these questions would be a ‘yes’, but now we will just need an ethical way to converse and change how they deal with spreading misinformation.